


i can't walk alone anymore

by WennyT



Series: all i see is blue in my heart [2]
Category: DBSK | Tohoshinki | TVfXQ | TVXQ
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Changmin's magical bag, Desert Island Fic, Exactly What It Says on the Tin, Fluff and Angst, Geographical Isolation, I don't know how to tag this, M/M, Wilderness Survival, and coconuts, handwavy survival skills, pls heed violence tag and here is a trigger warning for dead bodies, this fic is not kind to animals, with Jung Yunho's neuroses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-11-01 07:58:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20811731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WennyT/pseuds/WennyT
Summary: Yunho and Changmin crash land on a deserted island.





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> guilty mv: have some gorgeous apocalyptic visuals with hurt shim and jung being strong  
analog trip: have shim and jung in a gloriously low budget chaotic trip with suju boys  
me: WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU COMBINE THE TWO  
no one:  
me: AND BANISH SUJU BOYS  
no one:  
me: /writes 12k in 2 days/  
Mouldsee: i give up on you

Sometime in the near future, they go on another world tour. 

They’re in eastern China, in one of the coastal cities. Work in Japan doesn’t stop even though the tour’s ongoing; time for yet another red eye flight. So there’s been problems with their Chinese fans; Yunho knows Changmin thinks the fans have bribed their Chinese security company into leaking their travel schedules. 

They close ranks then, and one of the senior staff gets the bright idea of chartering them a private plane to avoid the screaming hordes.

Yunho feels he should still be thankful little impressionable girls -and boys- still find them cool and relevant and worthy of stalking. In the dead of night, when Changmin’s asleep and wrapped suffocatingly tight around him, he admits to himself that he feels exhausted whenever he looks too long at them. 

In any case, they get on a private plane owned by one of China’s many billionaires. People who buy and sell buildings like Yunho does mops and sandwich-makers off the home shopping channels. It’s need to know information, their flight, because they’re flying into Japan to work on a project still under embargo. 

It means they make the mistake of boarding when the only people who know the exact details of their flight time and designator are also the names on the flight manifesto. 

Actually, that makes it two mistakes. The other mistake is flying when there are three separate tropical storms brewing in the Pacific.

—

Yunho wakes up, his back on fire and something wet in his eyes. There’s birdsong and someone’s shining a light on his eyelids.

He opens his eyes. The light is sunshine. He’s wrapped up in a cocoon of some sort and there’s a dead body adjacent across him.

The smell hits him then. It’s involuntary; he turns and retches, throwing up yellow bile and little else. He’s still on his performance diet because of touring and the last he ate was when they were in the hotel in China.

They’re not at the hotel now. Where are they?

Yunho looks down. He’s not in a cocoon. It’s his seat, warped and wrapped around him, and right, they were in an airplane. He looks at the dead body again. It hasn’t got its head. His stomach lurches again, but he knows those clothes. 

He was the one who gifted that particular pair of jeans because a sponsor gave it to him but they were too short and thank God it’s not Changmin. It’s their road manager.

“Changmin,” he says out loud, and half jumps because that’s not his voice, hoarse and scratchy and weak. Nothing but birdsong answers him. 

He swipes at his eyes, and stares at the red decorating them. It’s blood, damp and crusting. Not quite fresh. He cranes his neck and wiggles his neck, arms, fingers, legs, feet, toes. He seems to be in one miraculous piece, head wound notwithstanding. 

“Changmin,” he whisper-croaks again. He doesn’t get an answer. He needs to find - get Changmin- what if he’s unconscious-

Yunho refuses to think of any alternative scenario. He shifts his body slightly, and turns his legs sideways. With a bit of wriggling he can get out. He scans his surroundings again as he inhales and flattens his arm against his knee. He cranes his neck.

He’s in a shallow ravine of sorts. There’s some greenery at its lip, higher up. The wreckage of the plane is around him, but there’s surprisingly little of it other than its nose, some crumpled bulky fuselage and seats. It’s like half the plane was blown elsewhere. They had one of their assistants on the plane and he’s nowhere in sight too.

There’s a mangled lump upfront that is in something black with a navy blue jacket sleeve and blood stained buttons. Yunho thinks maybe that’s the pilot. 

So that’s two bodies, and two missing men, and him. Yunho manages to extricate himself completely and tumbles over and back onto the ground. He pulls himself upright, staggering only slightly. 

He needs to find Changmin. 

He feels oddly calm. Everything seems muffled. Yunho thinks he may be going into shock. But he needs to find Changmin. That is the short term goal and then once he finds Changmin, they’ll know what to do. The two of them will be able to figure it out. They always do.

He staggers away from the crash site. 

—

It’s a stroke of luck he happens upon Changmin’s bag about two minutes from the site. In the two minutes of walking, Yunho’s thoughts clear somewhat from the dull drone of “Changmin where” to the extent of “find potable water and then find Changmin.”

He sees Changmin’s bag peeking out of the undergrowth but not the man. He tried, calling out Changmin’s name again, but there is no answer. The bag is one of Changmin’s personal pieces, rather than a sponsored bag, so Yunho goes over to heft it, grunting. It’s heavy, good. 

Because it’s Changmin, Yunho grabs the bag and drags until he can open it up under the shade of trees. Here the sun is still high in the sky, but the canopy is dense and only flickers of dappled sunlight fall on the jungle floor, Yunho and the bag.

The bag. Yunho undoes the clasp in front and flips the top flap back. Bingo. Jackpot. This is one of Changmin’s favourite personal packs, so it’s got a little bit of everything inside it. Just as Yunho had hoped.

There are empty metal water bottles (Changmin follows TSA restrictions to a T), three books, energy bars, two scarves, a mini sewing kit, a wine opener, slightly squashed bread, a makeup bag, keys, two folded umbrellas, two tees, a pair of clean boxer briefs, a tape measure, a mobile charger. 

Yunho digs into the pouches and hidden compartments and discovers more odd but definitely useful things. A dissembled switchblade, a ball of yarn-like string, a pair of clippers, a set of pencils, two cases containing a pair of washable chopsticks and spoons each. 

At the front pocket, he hits pay dirt. There’s three packs of matches and a box of fire starters. A pack of wet wipes. A large first aid kit. A bottle of… he stares. Cooking oil? It's oil of some sort. 

There's other bits and bobs but he's stared long enough and the sun's position has moved. He replaces everything inside the pack, muscle memory from military training, and hefts the bag over his shoulder. 

He stands too quickly and there's a wave of vertigo and everything turns white and washed out- I will not faint, Yunho thinks, gritting his teeth- _ I will not faint- _

Somehow he gets through it, still standing, groping and clutching at a tree trunk so hard that a chunk of bark comes away in his hands when he lifts his head.

"I need to find Changmin," he tells the trees. A lone songbird answers him. Changmin in his head says, _ you need water first, hyung, you need to wash that head wound and get it looked at_.

"I need to find Changmin."

—

It's been two hours, Yunho's sponsored watch strapped to his right wrist tells him. No Changmin yet, but he found a stream babbling over some rocks. It looks clear enough, it's moving water and there are no dead things in the water <strike>_they're all in the ravine_</strike>. He ignores the memory of his sergeant barking at his platoon about untreated water in the wild but scoops a handful to his lips. Needs must and all. 

He waits for fifteen minutes, moving a few paces downstream to swipe a few more handfuls for his face and hair. He's careful to shake the water away onto damp earth. If Changmin finds the same path of moving water downstream, he doesn't want to run the risk of Changmin drinking from a contaminated water source. 

It takes more than ten handfuls, but his hair is completely wet and he scrubs a hand through his hair and his forehead, pulling away a damp palm with no pink tinge. He prods gingerly at his hairline, down to his temple- and winces. It's tender and throbbing, but at least it's not bleeding anymore. 

There's a scrape down the side of his arm, nasty looking but it feels like a surface wound. He trickles water at it too. The blood has already clotted. 

Time passes, and he's feeling fine, so he drinks, but not too much. He knows what too much water on an empty stomach will do. After the initial check-through, it feels wrong to rifle through Changmin's things somehow. He's refrained so far, but now he opens it to take out an empty water bottle, and fills it.

Changmin might be thirsty, when he finds him. 

He does his business in the bushes, splashes water on his face a final time, and shoulders the pack. 

Yunho treks on. In a way, he's glad that Changmin was lazy and hauled one of his personal packs along. The weight of it is reassuringly heavy across his shoulders and it reminds him of the military, and their field trips out. 

Of course, that was with a million officers and sergeants and technology and field rations and chemical treatment for fresh water, but the weight of the pack is similar enough that Yunho can lock away the part of him that's gibbering hysterically - _ they've crashed he's survived a plane crash Changmin's missing the pilot is dead Changmin's missing their manager is dead Changmin _ \- and focuses on practicalities. 

"Find Changmin first," he says out loud again. A wild bird with jewel tones in its wings cocks its head at him, high on a branch but it doesn't take off. "Find Changmin first, then the rest can come."

\--

The sun is low in the sky, and he hasn't found Changmin.

Yunho's not losing hope. He refuses to lose hope, because there's no scenario conceivable where he can't find Changmin. He's just not looking hard enough. 

Yunho thinks he's walked a few times around the island, or at least once. The ache in his feet and the sweat down the back of his neck certainly think so. 

The bit of rock looks familiar and yes. It's the micro beach he came across about three hours back, when he pulled together his wits to stop crashing through the undergrowth and thought to follow the sun westward until it opens into the shore. Normal Yunho would be marvelling at how white and fine the sand is. Current Yunho just needs to find Changmin. 

He hasn't sat down in hours. The last time he did, after another trip to the little babbling brook (he found a marker in one of his pockets, leftover from the fan meet, and made marks on various trees as he encounters it) he couldn't quite stand. His vision had greyed again. 

After that, it is just better to remain on his feet.

He thinks he's hungry, but it's a strangely detached sensation. Logic tells him he scored full points in his survival training course in the army, during Hell Week, and they took away everything except his rifle and his compass. Logic points out he should check his mobile to see if there's still battery left and if there's remote hope of roaming service. Logic says things about shelter and getting edibles into his belly and moving higher up to surveil for safety since nightfall is coming. Logic makes noises about how it's more than half a day and Changmin's nowhere to be found and how the immediate one hour after a crash is the "Golden Hour" and chances of survival plummet after that- 

Logic can go fuck itself.

Yunho's suddenly, furiously, blindingly angry. He kicks at the rock and howls loud and long because it's not fair, it's not fair not fair not fair, "_Changmin ah_!"

A flock of birds burst from the treetops a fair bit away, probably startled by his lunatic scream. Yunho falls silent, hands grasping at the stubby grass by his calves. He's on his knees. He's so tired. His face feels wet. He swipes at his eyes.

He needs to find Changmin. He can't not find Changmin. 

\--

In the end, he doesn't find Changmin. 

Changmin finds him. 

\--

He's shaken awake roughly. He bats at the hands running over his shoulders and head. It must be manager hyung again. "No, five minutes, hyung, don't, I can wake up on my own there's an alarm I set a million alarms." 

There's a sharp crack, and then a white-hot pain erupts on his left cheek. It's enough to get him to sit up abruptly, wide awake, to Changmin's hand still raised in the air, Changmin crouched over and glaring at him. "Shim Changmin! That's enough, I'm still your hyung-"

Then he _remembers_. 

"Changmin." He reaches out, grasping and touching at the younger man's face. He's warm, and slightly sticky to the touch. "_Changmin_! I couldn't find you, I-" 

Changmin bats his hands away impatiently, then runs his own hand across Yunho's forehead instead. His touch is sure. "Do you feel dizzy, hyung? Do you feel too warm? Let me look at your pupils." 

Yunho just stares at him. "Changmin ah, you're real, right?" 

"Do I need to slap you again?" Changmin snaps. "Yes I am! Now tell me where does it hurt? Is it your head? Or your arm? I can't see any other wounds so you need to tell me."

"No, I… I, I'm fine," he gets out. "The head thing looks worse than it is. My arm doesn't hurt. It's just a scrape. You're really here, right? I had the oddest dream, we crashed on an island and..."

He trails off, sight arrested by the cluster of crooked palm trees by Changmin's head. He shifts, and the micro-beach comes into view again; only now it's dark and moonlit. 

Not a dream at all.

"I found you collapsed on your side, hyung," Changmin's running fingers down his sides now, pressing at his ribs. He pats over Yunho's calves. "You're not fine. Where else does it hurt? It's okay, it's me, it’s Changmin."

Yunho shakes his head. "It doesn't hurt. I'm not hurt." 

Changmin sits back on his haunches, perplexed. Yunho takes a good look at him. He's still dressed in the same outfit when they had boarded, but everything is rumpled and he's taken the linen jacket off and knotted it around his waist. His white tee is grubby with grass stains and the remnants of sweat. 

It reminds Yunho that he’s feeling sweaty under his own jumper, but there are insects and they’re on foreign terrain and it doesn’t seem like a good idea to strip down to his undershirt when he's alone. 

"Then…"

Yunho's oddly embarrassed. His eyes still feel sore and sticky. "I was angry," he tells his left knee. "I couldn't find you, and I've been looking all day…"

Changmin's gaze sharpens. "Are you saying you threw a tantrum."

Yunho doesn't look away from his knee. It's a bit morbid, but at least he's in sturdy jeans and trainers and so is Changmin. Imagine being lost on an uninhabited island after a plane crash in a suit. Or shorts. "I think I cried. Then I fell asleep. Maybe." 

"You…" Changmin runs a hand through his hair. Then another. Then another. "You're telling me Special Class Soldier Jung Yunho who was awarded full marks for his survivalist course, Uknow "I'm not tired because I'm Uknow Yunho" Yunho, Jung Yunho who says he'll sleep when he's dead, sat down and just gave up?"

Usually when Changmin’s tongue gets razor-edged like this, Yunho either laughs his yes-hyung-is-stupid laugh or snipes back. This isn't a normal situation, though. 

"I couldn't find you," he tells that selfsame knee. "I didn't give up. I looked and looked and looked but I couldn't find you."

There's a long silence, and then Changmin deflates. "You're an idiot, Yunho." Yunho ignores the prick of shame when Changmin calls him by name, and not 'hyung'. 

Another sigh, then a hand appears in his vision. "Come on. Up you get."

Yunho allows himself to be pulled into standing by Changmin, and immediately staggers. There's sparks in his vision. Changmin jams a quick arm around his waist. "Shit, you're _ hurt." _

"No, no," Yunho shakes his head once, twice, hard, "I'm fine. Just a little dizzy-" 

Changmin opens his mouth, and closes it. His eyebrows draw together. "When was the last time you ate?"

"Um."

"When was the last time you ate." It's not a question. 

"Dinner," Yunho says. 

There's another pause, then Changmin's eyebrows scrunch together even more. He looks like an Angry Bird. "Yunho, that's last night."

Yunho scratches at his arm. Changmin opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again. He makes a sound like a leaky kettle. He casts a glance around, and makes another sound when he sees his own pack lying on the ground. "There are energy bars in my bag, you idiot! Did you not even open it-" 

"I wanted to save them for you," Yunho says, oddly small. "You know you get hungry."

There's more silence, and then Changmin groans. "Now I can't even be angry at you, asshole." He reaches over and under the flap of his pack, and pulls out three. Unwrapping them, he waves them in front of Yunho's face.

"I'll eat later, Changmin, I'm not that hungry…" he trails off at the truly frightening look on Changmin's face. Changmin glowers at him. "Either you put them in your mouth by yourself, Jung Yunho, or I will shove them down your throat." 

Yunho eats. 

The energy bar is surprisingly tasty, and smelling of peanut butter and honey. Yunho tries not to calculate the calories sliding too smoothly down his throat right now, but Changmin catches his eye and guesses at his thoughts. 

"I make my own, so there aren't any empty calories, " he says, tightening his arm around Yunho again. With his other arm he stuffs half an energy bar into his own mouth. "You honestly think I'll buy those gross convenience store power bars?"

Digging further into the pack, he finds the bread (even more squashed). The glare he levels at Yunho is truly alarming and makes Yunho wince, but he doesn't shout. 

Instead, he makes Yunho lean against him and eat another energy bar and a bit of the bread ("slowly, or you'll choke because we don't have drinkable water") before he declares it time to move to shelter.

"We have shelter?" Yunho says, straightening to walk on his own. Changmin's arm coils tight around his waist. 

"Yeah," Changmin says. "I'll bring you to it. Come on."

\--

He's subjected to more nagging as they progress, especially after Changmin hears that he drank untreated water. Yunho lets him, content to bask in quiet relief. Changmin's here. He's here and walking and talking and nagging and he's _ here_. 

"-sometimes don't know where you put your brains," Changmin rages, a volatile summer storm, "Did that head wound also leave you with a concussion? I have metal water bottles and fire starters in my bag, you literally could have used _ that _ to boil water-"

"Changmin…"

"You're the one the South Korean military loves so much that they want to have you go in full-time as a staff sergeant," Changmin continues doggedly, "isn't that one of the first things they teach us about survival in the wild? _ Never drink untreated water_. I only did a month of Basic and even I know that!"

"I'm sorry." Yunho offers helplessly. It makes Changmin deflate like a day-old balloon, prickliness subsiding. He rubs at the back of his neck. His other arm has since shifted up to around Yunho's shoulders, steady and sure. "I swear you will make me grey before my time."

"When we get back to civilisation, you should have the hair stylists check your roots as soon as possible," Yunho jokes. Changmin stiffens slightly and doesn't answer.

\--

They're tromping through the trees, noisy in the undergrowth. Yunho's been in and out of it enough times that he knows how it's like - scraggly shrubs and stumpy trees, a few clearings and the little brook that became his saviour today. All of this is surrounded by the narrow slot of sand to give an island that takes about two hours to trek across. 

Yunho thinks he recognises a few of them, dim in the scant moonlight, but Changmin hangs a hard right and pulls him into a cluster he's sure he hasn't seen before. The trees are taller here, forming a natural tunnel. Changmin keeps to it, hitching the pack further up his shoulders - he's insisted he's carrying it, over Yunho's protests, due to how "I really think you have a concussion, your forehead is turning purple." 

They come up to what looks like a wall of trees, but Changmin turns sideways to do something with both hands. Already Yunho's back feels cold.

Suddenly, there's a gap between the tight whorls of leaves and branches, and Changmin is beckoning Yunho forward. "Come here," he says, "careful, don't let them scratch you, come here." 

Yunho squeeze in and past him. Then he's in and- he stops and stares. 

It's another clearing, except more. It's sheltered on three sides by a giant rock formation that's more of a mini-cliff, with a lipped overhang that even serves like a primitive ceiling of sorts. The other side is fenced in by a dense tangle of trees- where they just entered, Yunho realises. 

The whole thing is about the size of one of the smaller practice rooms at Avex in Japan, with slightly more than half of it under and within the shadowed rocky outcrop. It's to that where Changmin leads Yunho, and deposits the pack to lean against the rock with a soft sigh. 

Yunho blinks at the space. There's brown things - dried palm fronds?- on the ground, spread out in an attempt to give some cushion. Nearby, there's a pile of dry twigs and shrivelled palm leaves. "I was picking those when I heard you," Changmin explains. 

"Heard me?" Yunho can feel the blood rushing go his face. 

"Yeah. Your very loud 'Changmin ah'?" The other man guides Yunho to sit leaning against the wall. He digs into his pack for the bread and passes it to Yunho. "I guess something good came out of that tantrum and our projection lessons. But sound carries and there was wind, so I took about an hour before I found you. We were on opposite sides of this island, by the way. I woke up near this place, on the beach. Spent part of the morning trying to figure out how to climb that rock to get to this clearing for shelter, before I thought about coming round to the other side."

"You need to eat some too!" Yunho pretends he didn't hear what Changmin said about his brief breakup with sanity, and scowls, waving a piece of bread at the other. 

Changmin pauses, and nods. "Yeah, okay, pass that over." He tosses it back in one mouthful.

Yunho chews on the bread slowly as he watches Changmin take out the filled water bottle, another empty water bottle, and a fire starter. He walks over to the very edge of the overhang and crouches. "What are you doing?"

"What you should have done this morning when you found your stream," Changmin replies. 

He does something, and then there's a bit of a spark, and smoke. Then there's a small fire crackling away merrily. Yunho’s never made fire with a firestarter before. In survivalist training, they used the striking method with natural tinder. All other times they had the luxury of solid fuel tablets and recruits digging fire holes for them. 

Changmin uncaps the filled water bottle and sits its bottom into the fire. The smoke drifts up and out into the night. 

"Can I help?" Yunho asks. His fingers itch. "I'll take stock- do the inventory." 

"Yeah, all right."

Yunho pulls Changmin's pack over to him, already familiar with its contents. There's a little black leather satchel, leaning against the rocky wall and clearly brought over by Changmin, but when Yunho reaches towards it, Changmin shakes his head. 

"Nothing much of use in there," he reports as Yunho rifles through it. "I think it's the personal assistant's. I found it on the beach too. It's mostly our travel documents, but it was all wet. Although there is also a tub of Innisfree hand cream and a metal lunchbox. And a Swiss Army torchlight that doubles as a pocketknife but that's it." 

He doesn't look at Yunho and mutters, "I couldn't find the PA."

"Well, at least we have our passports here," Yunho pats at the satchel weakly. Changmin doesn't give a response. 

\--

The water boils as Changmin unknots his linen jacket, wrapping it around his hand and pulling the hot water bottle out of the fire. He tries to be quick, but still he hisses from the heat as he pours a bit of the water over to the empty bottle. Handing it to Yunho, he puts the other, still heated bottle on the ground, away from the fire. 

"I'll drink it in a little bit," Yunho says absentmindedly, still taking stock of what they have. His mind has cleared somewhat, aided a little by the energy bars and bread, and a lot by Changmin's presence. 

Changmin hums, removing his trainers - previously white and now grubby and brown- and sitting down next to Yunho, flexing his toes with a relieved groan. He prods at Yunho's knee, but Yunho's counting articles and rolling clothing up into piles, so he reaches over to tug Yunho's socks and black trainers off. Yunho barely notices. 

"Okay, so. We have clothing essentials, food essentials, survival essentials, utensils and miscellaneous. Also, you're soft in the head to bring three books along onto the flight!" 

"I was worried I'll be bored," Changmin says mildly. 

"You. I. Ugh. You. So what have you been eating and drinking, then?" Yunho counters intelligently. "You didn't have your bag!" 

Changmin must be half-expecting this question, because he points lazily to his left. There is a ragged pile of brown, which Yunho didn't quite notice just now. He takes a closer look and, "coconuts," he says, astonished. 

"Mind you, they taste like shit compared to the ones we had in Phuket and Bora Bora and all," Changmin shrugs, "and I didn't have any spoons or hard metal with me, so I couldn't really get at the flesh. But it was better than nothing. At least I finished the coconut water. And I only chose the ripe ones that fell when I poked at them."

Yunho works his mouth around a million questions, gives up and just blurts, "how do you even picked them?" 

"We learnt how to climb coconut trees in Saipan, remember?" Changmin's voice is wry. "There's palm trees too. But they're green and taller and the oil palm fruit is different." 

"But that was years ago!"

He shrugs. "I had nothing to do and a lot of time to recall what the guide said. And I remember how good coconut is for your body. Didn't Tom Hanks eat a lot of coconuts in Cast Away?" 

"Oh dear God, we're Tom Hanks," Yunho realises, and Changmin barks out a sharp squeal of laughter, "Are you gonna grow your beard out like him, too?" 

"We'll be rescued before that happens." Yunho says. Changmin sobers, adding another browned palm frond to the fire. It crackles, and burns a little more energetically. 

"I was thinking about the crash," he says, after prodding a little more at the fire. He doesn't look at Yunho. "I don't know if you remember… there was a tropical storm that just blindsided us."

"I think I blacked out by then," Yunho thinks, but he can't recall much other than a lot of turbulence and yelling and pain. 

"Yeah. I was turning to look at you, but your face was turned away, and you were slumped in your seat. I was terrified." Changmin admits. 

There's nothing Yunho can do except reach over and grip Changmin tightly around the shoulder. "I'm sorry."

"Not your fault." The younger man poked at the fire again. "But Yunho… I was thinking about it all day. We were flying from Shanghai to Tokyo. It's the East China Sea, right? If we've crashed on our original flight path, this will be one of many islands belonging to Japan, below Kyushu."

He waves a hand around, "I mean, clearly this isn't Okinawa, unless they've demolished all the resorts, but maybe one of the smaller islands."

Yunho's nodding along. It makes sense. 

Then Changmin takes a deep breath, and stares at the fire. "If this were a Japanese island… The Japanese depend so heavily on maritime trade. But I've been listening hard all day, Yun. Don't you hear it too?"

Yunho thinks. 

He looks at Changmin. He looks at the trees. Then he looks up. "There hasn't been any ships all day. There's no… ships are noisy. There hasn't been any ships." 

"And today's Wednesday," Changmin says. "It's midweek. It should be business as usual." 

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. Yunho's nearly forgotten about his. Changmin's phone has 75% battery left. There's absolutely no service at all. "Look," Changmin says, opening the Maps function. 

He points at Shanghai, then at Tokyo. Then in between them, at the East China Sea. He drags the screen down slightly. Okinawa shows up, and smaller islands like Amami and Yakushima. 

But Changmin keeps going, dragging the screen left, pushing through an endless expanse of blue, until his finger lands on "PACIFIC OCEAN". 

\--

They don't say much about it, because what is there to say? Yunho sips at the now cooled boiled water, and says quietly. "We still have to try and draw attention to ourselves. Even if we were blown so off course, even if they don't know where to even begin to look for us- we have to try." 

"Of course," Changmin nods. But he looks resigned.

"We'll be okay," Yunho tells him. He doesn't know if he's trying to convince himself or Changmin. Maybe both. "We have each other. We'll be okay."

They settle in to sleep after, because Changmin points out they're both exhausted. His two giant scarves are repurposed as thin blankets. 

It's still a balmy almost-summer night, being September. Yunho forces himself to not think about the likely scenario that they might still be here come winter. Or perhaps small islands like this won't have winter. There are palm trees, after all. 

So the scarves are now blankets and Changmin's jacket and Yunho's jumper - since he has on an undershirt- are acting as pillows for both of them. They lie side-by-side at the edge of the rock wall, on top of a pile of fronds that Changmin's picked so it's not quite the cold hard earth for them. Their faces are angled towards the entrance of the overhang, where the fire still burns. 

"Almost like basic training all over again," Changmin snorts, already wrapping himself into a burrito with the scarf. His legs stick out from the knee below, still jeans-clad, but his feet are bare. It’s a curious sight.

When they're silent, Yunho can hear the faint sound of waves, and the jungle a distance away from them. “I can hear the ocean,” he says.

Changmin sticks a finger out of his scarf-rrito. “It’s just behind this rock, that’s the beach I found myself on. We can go see it tomorrow.” 

Yunho makes a noise of assent, and Changmin’s finger retreats back into his nest. 

An unknown night bird trills, oddly muffled. It feels like there’s a bubble about them. 

"Changdol, the pilot and our manager are both dead," Yunho says, voice cracking in the quiet. "I woke up in a ravine and the plane was around me and they were there." 

Changmin takes a breath, and another. Then he rolls towards Yunho, curves around him tight, to hold together the pieces. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Working title of this was "island au" "tom hanks au" "coconuts au".  
Actual title is transcreated from "もう独りで歩けない" in Forever Love by X Japan.
> 
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	2. ii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #GUILTY youtu. be/1XLxZ5rJzQs  
#toho15th #XV #東方神起
> 
> XV twitter. com/toho15th_JP  
#toho15th #XV #東方神起 #Tohoshinki  
#TVXQ #DongBangShinKi

Yunho’s eyes snap open. There’s birdsong and he can’t quite move. It feels like déjà vu. 

He has a moment of pure unadulterated panic, until there’s a loud exhale behind him, ruffling the hair at his nape. Then he registers the arms around his shoulders, the knee over his knee and the giant scarf wrapped around him, and relaxes.

Faint light is streaking the sky, so it must be morning. The rivets in Changmin’s jeans are digging in the small of his back and Yunho’s urge to piss is strong. 

He’s had decades of experience extricating himself from a sleeping Changmin, after years of sharing beds due to too tight schedules and too small spaces, but it’s harder than usual today. 

He only pulls himself free after a complicated duck-and-wiggle, and shoves his jumper into Changmin’s arms. The younger man’s arms close like a vise around the bundle and he snuffles, face ducked into knitted wool. 

Yunho loses a few seconds staring. Then his bladder jabs him with a sharp reminder. 

“Shit,” Yunho mutters, voice scratchy. He doesn’t want to go too far - what if Changmin wakes up and he’s not here? But he doesn’t want to pee at their campsite, either. 

He takes another quick glance at Changmin, who grunts and curls even tighter into himself. It’s quite an amusing sight; all six-feet-one of him jammed into a ridiculously small ball and bare bony feet. 

In the end, Yunho compromises; he puts his trainers on to go through the same tangle Changmin had showed him last night, when he was dazed and emotional and confused, and does his business quickly in the shrubs some distance away. 

Back at their campsite in a jiffy, he breathes a sigh of relief when he looks over and sees that Changmin hasn’t stirred. Yunho goes over to fold the scarf he’s used, his morning routine in the army a muscle memory, then pauses.

He looks at the scarf in his hands, then at Changmin’s feet. He tucks the ends of it around Changmin’s knees and feet instead.

In the light of the morning, Yunho rubs a hand hard over his eyes. His brain feels a lot clearer compared to yesterday. In the light of the morning, he can admit privately to himself that yesterday he was probably pushing through a mild - only mild!- concussion, and had worked himself up into a panic attack and subsequent breakdown. 

That’s fine. Today is a new day. 

He’s packed their inventory into tidy piles within the shelter of the overhang last night. Changmin had given another brittle bark of laughter and said, “the South Korean government can really work miracles,” when inspecting how he’s rolled what remaining clothing they have in neat little tubes. He goes over to it now, kicking casually at the ashes of the fire from last night. 

They should probably dig a fire hole today, to have more control over the longevity of it. 

Yunho squints at the piles. They have clothing essentials, food essentials, survival essentials, utensils and miscellaneous. They’re really lucky that Changmin has a fetish for being an anxious and paranoid Boy Scout (who was never actually in the Boy Scouts) and keeping such an array of necessities on him even as they move around. Yunho shudders at the thought of the sponsored duffel he carried yesterday - it only had a snapback cap, his wallet and a spare jumper in it, to give the bag some volume. 

He does a quick count again. 

Including his undershirt and the white tee Changmin has on, and their outerwear, that’s six tops that can last them for the weeks (he doesn’t want to think about months) till they’re rescued. Between them and the spare pair of underwear, that’s three. Yunho’s fine, he’s not fussed and Changmin’s the one who’s particular about that, so he can have the spare. At least they both have jeans and trainers on, properly sturdy, so they don’t need to worry about coverage for their lower half. 

Material from the umbrellas can probably be stripped and used as tarp, since it’s waterproof. Yunho leans back to eye at the rock overhang they’re under. They should use that and run something by the two sides, so that even if it rains, they’ll have somewhere dry to retreat to. 

The wine opener can be repurposed as a knife or at least something sharp. Yunho assembles the switchblade Changmin has, and detaches the Swiss Army knife portion from the torchlight. That’s three knives they have, and a pair of clippers. 

He had dug further into Changmin’s pack last night and found a pack of disposable razors. Yunho rubs a hand over his chin and leaves them in their plastic packaging. 

Changmin’s a paranoid freak, so the sewing kit and wet wipes and most importantly the first aid kit is a God-send. A Changmin-send? He opens it, and checks. There’s even prescribed antibiotics, large white pills that are strong and effective and reduces the feeling in Yunho’s tongue. There’s ibuprofen and rubbing alcohol and surgical gauze and bandages and iodine for scrapes, which they can use to make potable water, too.

Yunho suppresses the memory of his freak out by the stream yesterday. 

They’re not too shabby on the fire-making front. There’s Changmin’s box of fire starters and the matches, which should be kept for emergencies. Changmin’s already picked plenty of natural tinder, so they should use that first. The metal lunch box in the missing assistant’s satchel can be deconstructed into its lid and its body, Yunho doing exactly that, so they can be used as two separate mess tins. 

Yunho knocks a knuckle against them, considering. They probably need to test if it conducts well on fire, but if the answer is yes, they can cook using it. Yunho can rig up a cooking system. Even the three metal bottles can be used for the mess, and they have reusable metal chopsticks and spoons because Changmin gets fussy sometimes when they eat on location.

The makeup bag is the most useless out of what they have, but Changmin will probably be happy that he still has enough moisturiser and sunblock for about a month. 

What worries him the most is their food supplies. They’ve finished the bread at Changmin’s insistence yesterday, and they also went at the energy bars, so there’s only nine left. Nine energy bars won’t last them half a day, especially if they’re setting up camp today. They’re two full-grown men and they’ll need the fuel with all that exercise. 

He looks at the coconuts Changmin’s picked. There are seven unopened. But they can’t survive on just coconuts. His ex-staff sergeant’s rasp, Busan satoori-thick, sounds in his head. _ Man cannot survive coconuts alone. Eat only coconuts and you’ll find yourself shitting coconuts. Continuously. _

They need to find an alternative food source today. He doesn’t recall seeing any types of edible berries or fruits, but admittedly he wasn’t paying much attention to the trees beyond “have I been by this in my quest to find Changmin”. They would need protein, though. 

Yunho sniffs at the faint hint of salt in the air. The sea. Fish, maybe? He hasn’t the faintest about fishing, though, and he’ll bet neither does Changmin. This was the man who was apologising non-stop from causing other living creatures deliberate pain when a production crew gave him the task of dismembering live lobsters by hand on camera.

Yunho’s done field dressing before, but the island’s jungle doesn’t seem like it has large game. And he doesn’t have his rifle nor the standard-issue army knife. 

His thoughts don’t venture further down that path, because there’s a rustling behind him, and Changmin sits up with a groan.

“Morning,” Yunho tells him, making an attempt to sound perky. 

“Yurgbrfle,” Changmin replies. He yawns wide, drawing an arm over his face and yanks at his hair. His stubble is fully grown in and he looks wild. “Why you. Squatting? At supplies.”

“Oh,” Yunho says. For all his grand plans, in reality he’s crouching in front of their supplies with them half spread out around him. “Um. Supplies check?” 

“’Kay,” Changmin says, not yet listening. He rolls to his feet and nearly trips over the scarf Yunho’s tucked around his feet. “Mmmmgh. Water and food. Breakfast. You?”

“Not yet,” Yunho admits, and then Changmin looks more awake. Yunho adds quickly, “planning on eating now!”

\--

They’re chowing down two energy bars each, washing it down with pulls of the boiled water. Yunho’s tidied away the scarves and their outerwear. 

“Time ’s it?” Changmin asks, folding the wrappers into a neat square. Yunho gives a start and looks at his watch. “Quarter to seven.”

“Mmm, low tide,” the other says, hefting the almost-empty pack onto his shoulders, the empty water bottles clanking around in the space, “come on, I saw something yesterday and I have a hypothesis. Let’s go.” 

“What hypothesis?” Yunho allows himself to be prodded along. They exit the tangle of trees, and Changmin turns off to his left. “We need to get water today, Changdol.”

Changmin hums, leading the way down a gentle decline. “At the stream you found yesterday? Yeah, we should. We can fill the bottles and then also see if we can find something that can act as a receptacle so we don’t have to keep running off to it whenever we are thirsty.”

Yunho nods, but then Changmin tilts his head. “Do you want to split up? You can get the water since you know the way. I just want to check o-”

“No.” Yunho says, and his tone makes Changmin still. “We are not splitting up.”

“Okay,” Changmin says, oddly gentle. He drifts back, until they’re shoulder to shoulder. “We won’t.” 

\--

“So we’re sure the island is uninhabited, right?” 

“I didn’t come across a single living soul,” Yunho says, low. They both fall silent, thinking about the ravine. Yunho clears his throat. “And the birds I’ve seen are all extremely bold. They see me crashing around, but they just stare. And sing.”

“Unused to humans,” Changmin breaks a branch off, tip jagged and sharp. He breaks another, another. “I haven’t explored as much as you did, but from what I’ve seen so far… it’s not even that it’s deserted. I think no one’s been here before.”

They round a bend, and it opens to an expanse of white sand. There’s bits of colour at the edge, where dry sand meets wet, and Changmin gestures at it. “That was where I woke up. That’s.. The other half of the plane. Or a quarter?”

Yunho goes over to inspect, but it’s all bits of unrecognisable metal and plastic and suddenly, he has a terrifying realisation that Changmin is very, very, very lucky to be alive. He looks at Changmin and Changmin looks at him. Yunho's voice shrivels up in his throat.

Changmin swallows. “I know. I think I landed in the sea, because I woke up all wet and there were all these.”

Yunho takes a deep breath and pinches at the bridge of his nose, stuffing the emotions back into a giant big box and shoving it into some dark dusty corner of his psyche. There are a lot of those. “I… Okay. Okay. But what about-”

He looks around. He didn’t see them in the ravine yesterday. “But what about our luggage? Our suitcases?”

Changmin spreads out both hands. “Crashed into the ocean? Maybe the currents pulled them away. I don't know. The bulk of our stuff wasn’t boarded anyway. I think most of the clothes were with the stylists to ship back to Korea.” He fiddles with the branches in his hand, and goes, “come on, I really want to see if this hypothesis is correct.”

Yunho follows him right to what was the water’s edge, non-existent now that it is morning and low tide. The sea is flat at this time, revealing a long, grey gritty expense of wet beach with puddles in it and- Changmin makes a noise of triumph and darts over to a larger puddle. He stabs his branch in. 

And pulls it out, with a wriggling fish attached to the end of it. Yunho blinks in disbelief. “What?” 

"My dad taught me this," Changmin is saying, doing something with the stick that makes the fish go abruptly limp. He walks forward, Yunho trailing behind him. "Well, okay, not really this. But we used to always volunteer at beaches, and he'll point out that at low tide, larger puddles will likely have fish and," he pokes the other end of the branch into another puddle, and suddenly there's a shell or clam flipped out onto the wet sand, “all sorts of other things trapped in them."

They continue, until they've three fishes and an assortment of shells - clams? mollusks? - most of them little. Yunho doesn’t know what fish they are, but they’re not quite colourful and of a decent size, and beggars can’t be choosers. 

Changmin makes Yunho hold the clams in his hands, swinging his pack off of his shoulders. He digs and pulls out two sacks.

Yunho is doing his best to keep himself still, but a tiny crab just climbed out from one of the clams and if he's not wrong, it's applying its pincers to the meaty turn of his palm. Ouch. "I didn't see those."

"It's a hidden compartment- see?" Changmin flips open the edge and shows him. "They're laundry bags, but they're waterproof, so I guess they can work." 

"As what?" Yunho asks, and tips the handful of clams into one of sacks when Changmin indicates so. The fish go into the other. They switch, Yunho shouldering the pack. The water bottles clank. 

Both sacks in hand, Changmin takes a few more steps, then another. There's an odd darker line in the sand not far from him, and Yunho stares at it. He doesn't quite understand, until he does. "Changmin ah, _ wait_!"

"Relax," Changmin says, too dangerously close to the edge and dipping the sacks into abrupt deep water. "I need seawater for the clams, otherwise they'll be gritty." 

"You'll fall in," Yunho says, terrified. He clutches at the bag's shoulder straps. The ocean only just gave Changmin back. "Come back."

"I won't, see, I'm not even standing at the edge. Can you pass me an empty bottle? I want to get extra so we don't need to trek back in a bit-"

"_Come back_," Yunho repeats. 

Changmin looks back, and blinks. He stands up and away, coming closer. He's two paces away and not close enough. Yunho snatches at him, yanking him over. The sacks wobble, but Changmin doesn't drop them.

Yunho clutches him close, breathing hard. His face is plastered in the crook of Changmin's neck and he can smell clearly how Changmin needs a bath. They both do. It's pungent and sticky and with the faint sour scent of day old sweat and he doesn't care. 

"Don't do that," he bites out. Yunho's aware he's behaving like a mental patient but they're stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash without another living human soul around and no means of communication to the outside world so he figures he's allowed. "Don't- you'll fall in and-" _ drown_. 

Changmin holds still. "Yunho," his voice is cautious, soft. Yunho heard this voice many times in 2010 and he never thought he'll hear it again. "It's okay. I'm okay. I swim, remember? And seawater's useful-"

"Then we'll get it from the shore when the tide is in," Yunho snarls. His voice is too loud and his mouth is just next to Changmin's ear but Changmin doesn't flinch. "You're not allowed to go near that line, do you hear? Don't you dare."

"Okay," Changmin soothes, "okay. I won't. I won't."

\--

They wander back to shore, Yunho apologetic for his outburst and picking too many clams to compensate. They don't talk about it. 

Changmin looks at him when they're safely back on dry white sand. "Now what? Should we go back to the campsite, first?"

"No," Yunho says, head clearer. The sun's higher on the horizon. Yunho looks at his watch, and tries his phone cursorily. Still no service. His phone's battery is low. It's nine in the morning. "Let's go get freshwater first."

Yunho leads the way, Changmin walking a step behind him, with both sacks clutched in his hands. There's no conversation but the silence is relatively easy and they make good time. 

They come to the brook, more downstream than when Yunho first encounters it yesterday. It's wider and deeper here, and Yunho toes his trainers and socks off and folds his jeans up. The water is comfortably cool despite the humid air and it comes up to just below his knee. 

Changmin hovers, mouth an uncertain line. Yunho looks at him. "If we get our water supply upstream, it doesn't matter if we contaminate it here, right?"

"Well. Theoretically not," Changmin says. "Look at the movement- the current is live and fast. It probably flows out to the sea anyway… you're the one who actually did survival training."

"Yeah, but you're the one who hikes in national parks. And you’re smart," Yunho returns. He wades out and back on the jungle floor. Shedding the pack, he grasps his under shirt and lifts it over and above his head. 

"Yunho?" Changmin hasn't let go of the sacks yet.

"I don't know about you," Yunho says, shedding his jeans too. He rolls both into neat tubes and stacks them on top of the pack. "But I really, really, really need a bath."

He pauses for a second and thinks, _ it's Changmin anyway, _ and takes his boxer briefs off very quickly. Then he turns away and steps into the stream which is now more of a small creek, sitting down fast so the water comes up to his chest.

"Agh, it's cold," he gasps, an involuntary shiver running through him. Changmin's still just standing there. He takes a deep breath and dunks his head under, coming back up. "Come on, Changdol."

Changmin finally moves, putting the sacks down with stiff movements. "You. What if there was something in the water! You just sat down like that!"

"I looked," Yunho says. He splashes water onto his face and scrubs at his arms and legs, fingernails collecting a brown-grey layer of grime. "Besides, this stream is small. What can be in it? Freshwater eels? We can add that to the menu too then." 

A half-growl escapes him, but Changmin starts stripping as well. Yunho averts his gaze, out of politeness, and trickles water over the scrape on his arm. It's scabbed over. He feels at his forehead, but there aren't any lumps. It hurts when he prods at it, though. 

There's a splash, and Changmin's sitting down next to him. "Fuck me it's cold," he squawks, and hits Yunho very hard on the uninjured arm. 

"Ow," Yunho says, but Changmin's already rubbing at his arm in apology and his fingers are on Yunho's chin, tilting his face up to the light. 

Yunho holds still. His heart is beating very fast. 

Changmin doesn't seem to notice. His eyes are roving intently across Yunho's forehead. "It's turning green. I have a mirror in my makeup bag, you can see it later," and drifts a gentle finger over it.

"Ow," Yunho says again. Changmin rolls his eyes at him, and brushes Yunho’s hair up and off his forehead. "We'll put some iodine on it later," he states, and inspects Yunho's arm next. "This one too."

"Okay," Yunho says, and lets out a breath when Changmin finally lets go of him to see to his own ablutions.

\--

There is a rustle amongst the trees on the opposite bank, the side that leads in the other direction away from their campsite. They both freeze, anxiety strumming hard through their bodies. Beneath the water surface, Yunho's got one hand on Changmin's arm and his other hand wrapped around a large rock. His heart is pounding very loudly in his ears. 

Something pink with whiskers pokes through - a nose, Yunho realises- and promptly freezes. There's a slight breeze and whatever it is must be downwind of them, to catch their scent. 

Whatever it is never shows itself in full. There's a tickle in Yunho's nose and he sneezes, the wheeze explosively loud in the jungle. The pink vanishes as the animal (?) takes off with a loud rush of leaves that fades too quickly into silence tempered by the ever present buzzing and chirping of jungle insects and birds.

Yunho rubs a knuckle at his nose, meeting Changmin's eyes. The younger man's eyes are rounded with wary wonder, and to Yunho's surprise, slight annoyance. "What? Why are you looking at me like that? It's good that it ran off, right? I mean, I would fight it, but we're naked. Give a man his underwear at least." 

Changmin rolls his eyes and flicks a finger at Yunho's ear. "You idiot. Didn't you see what it is?" 

"No, I was too busy thinking about fighting it," Yunho says honestly, and ducks the second flick Changmin aims his way. 

"It was a cat! A beautiful little jungle cat," Changmin tells him crossly. "Didn't you see its eyes? It had band markings on its arms!"

"And it was coming to eat our faces," Yunho tells him seriously. This time, he shies away from Changmin's finger flick but gets a face-full of water splashed into his eyes for his troubles.

"You're an idiot. Look at where we are," Changmin lets go of him to wave a dripping arm at the rushing creek they're sitting in. "I think we're sitting in its water dish."

"Changdol, why are you so angry? Do you still have the fetish of being a pet cat in an unsuspecting teenage girl's room for a day," Yunho asks gravely. His yelp is muffled when Changmin shoves his head down into the water. 

\--

Yunho’s gaze is arrested on Changmin’s back when he moves. “You’re hurt.” He sucks in a breath. It’s a vertical cut, messy, although it’s also starting to scab like the scrape on Yunho’s arm. 

The other twists, but he can’t quite see the injury due to its position. “Oh! I didn’t realise.”

“That’s getting treated with iodine too,” Yunho declares, frowning ferociously. Changmin shrugs, mouth curved. “Okay.”

\--

They finish up, and with great reluctance, wade to the bank and dress themselves in their dirty clothing. The air is turning warm, the sun climbing higher, so Yunho looks at the sun and looks at the water, and makes a decision. 

Whilst Changmin moves a distance still within sight upstream to fill their water bottles, Yunho pulls his jeans on, forgoing underwear, and dunks both his undershirt and boxer briefs into the water and wrings. 

He tucks the edge of the briefs into his back pocket. It'll have to dry when they're back at the campsite. Pulling the under shirt on with some difficulty, he reaches around his back to unroll the fabric; he's wrung it as dry as possible but it still sticks to his skin. At least it feels cleaner, and is cool. 

Changmin comes back with all bottles filled and stops in his tracks. "What are you doing." His voice is very high.

Yunho is poking at the fish in the sack. "Should we wash this?" 

"I'll do it," Changmin says in the same high tone. "You'll catch a cold!" He digs into the pack for the switchblade and Swiss Army knife, grabbing the sack to move back to the creek. 

Yunho makes a face at his back. "I'm not fragile!" 

He goes to the pack, and rummages around. Yes, Changmin brought the first aid kit along too, like he knew he would. Withdrawing the bottle of iodine, he pours a couple of drops into one of the filled water bottles, and shakes. 

He drinks half of it and brings it over to Changmin, who's already scaled and gutted two fishes and is on the third. The skin looks a bit worse for the wear, a given since the fish scaler on the Swiss Army knife is a bit of a joke due to how small it is. He waves the bottle under Changmin's nose. The other looks up at him and raises an eyebrow.

"I added a bit of iodine," Yunho says to the unspoken question. Because both of Changmin's hands are covered in fish guts and slimy bits, he puts the mouth of the bottle to Changmin's lips and feeds. 

The younger man's head follows the movement obediently, tilting up and back. The line of his throat arches, gleaming in the sunshine. 

Water pours in a slow glittering cascade. His throat moves. 

He swallows, pink tongue coming out to catch at the stray droplet lingering on the wide curve of his bottom lip. 

Yunho's oddly transfixed by the sight. His own throat feels parched, even though he's just drank water himself. His jeans are too tight.

The bottle is empty. He snatches it back hastily. "I'll go upstream to refill it again," he tells the brackish moss decorating the jungle floor, and marches off. 

By the time he comes back, Changmin's done with the fish and rinsing them as well as the sack they were in. "Washing them," he explains to Yunho's questioning look. "We don't need salt water anymore because they're prepped. And that seawater had fish guts floating in it anyway." 

"The other one?" Yunho asks, inclining his chin towards the clam sack, sat still bulging at the base of a tree.

"That one's for dinner." Changmin says. He pats at two of the fishes. "This is lunch." 

They head back to the campsite, Yunho carrying the pack and the gutted fish by their tails. Changmin follows behind him, a filled sack in each hand. He's insisted on bringing some extra water back to the campsite in the rinsed sack, "and you can't drink this, remember," he nags.

\--

To Changmin's vexation, they don't spot any other obvious denizens of the jungle, although Yunho does point out the signs of small animal warrens along the way as they walked; possibly belonging to moles or even hares.

They're back at the campsite. Yunho’s appropriating a couple of palm-sized rocks with a sharp edges to help him dig the fire hole, but Changmin stops him before he starts. 

He roots around in the first aid kit and “aha!”, holds aloft a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves. Slicing thin strips of linen from the back of his jacket, he winds them around Yunho’s fingers, first knuckle to tip. Then he makes Yunho put the gloves on.

“You don’t know what’s in the soil,” he says to Yunho’s questioning look. “I…. what you need is gardening gloves. Or at least knitted gloves. But at least this way you’ll have some protection.”

“Okay, Changdol,” Yunho says, grinning like a fool at him. Changmin clears his throat and bustles away. “I’m going to see if I can rig something up with the umbrellas,” he retreats into the shadow of the outcrop. “Let me know when the fire’s up and going.”

“Aye aye sir,” Yunho salutes, and ducks the ball of dried palm fronds Changmin flings at him. 

He walks about their campsite, testing the earth, and picks a spot out the open, nearly at the trees, to dig the pit for the fire hole. The earth’s firm but not hard packed, and he has a good sweat going on by the time it’s about fourteen inches across and fifteen inches deep. 

Luck is on their side, because there are old burrows - probably the work of some small mammal- opening out to the decline by the side, so Yunho appropriates them to widen and curve the smoke tunnel gently, to avoid tree roots. His staff sergeant had taught, _ don’t shit where you eat, _so it extends beyond the corpse of trees serving as their rudimentary gate, and opens into the slope.

If they do end up being here for more than a few days, Yunho thinks he will hunt for rocks or pebbles by the beach to surround the lip with; it would be easier to grill something then. 

By the time he lifts his head, finished with shaping it, the sun is high in the sky and his undershirt is sticking to him again. His back and knees are killing him. Yunho uses the bottom of it to swipe at his face, and turns back to the outcrop.

“Umbrella thing failed, so we’ll have to think on it more.” Changmin’s seated on his linen jacket spread over a pile of dried palm fronds and he hands a water bottle and an open coconut to Yunho. Yunho gulps down a little water, and goes after the coconut. The juice is ambrosia on his tongue. He finishes the whole thing. 

He gives the now-dry coconut back to Changmin, watching as Changmin immediately starts scraping at the side of the fruit with one of the metal spoons. 

Yunho feels like he needs another plunge in the creek. It’s like he took a shower of grime in his clothes. Pouring a bit of water onto his head and chest, he hooks the bottom of his undershirt over the back of his neck. The fabric bites into his armpits, but it’s cooler this way.

He thinks he heard Changmin make a noise, but he looks down to see Changmin still scraping away at the coconut, face blank and calm. He offers the first piece of white flesh to Yunho, though, via tossing, so Yunho’s inclined to forgive him for looking so annoyingly civilised in comparison. 

Yunho snaps his teeth, catching it mid-throw. The fruit is mild, and Yunho chews, savouring the taste. Changmin makes a surprised noise when he himself tosses back a large piece, too. “Oh, this one tastes better than the ones I ate yesterday.”

“Mmpfh,” Yunho says, reaching for more with his soil-stained gloves. Changmin smacks his arms away, fingers holding up a bit of coconut instead. He makes an impatient noise and gestures with his chin, “come here.”

Yunho leans down to take the coconut in between his teeth. 

His lips brush Changmin’s fingers, the edge of his left incisor pressing gently against the pad of Changmin’s index finger, and he pulls. 

Their gazes lock, tangled. Yunho swipes the coconut into his mouth with his tongue. 

The silence expands in a heartbeat, two. 

He swallows. 

Changmin looks away first. There are slashes of colour high on his cheekbones. 

“Not everything is a competition, Jung,” he says, getting up. His arm brushes Yunho’s as he makes his way to where their fire-starting supplies are stacked. “I’ll take care of the fire and lunch. You rest now.”

"I'll dig a refuse hole first," Yunho suggests, feeling strangely off-balance. He looks around the campsite. "It shouldn't be here though. Just in case there's big game or your jungle cat has larger cousins… we need to build it a distance away."

He thinks about it, then says, "maybe beyond the trees, and all the way down the slope? I'll go dig it there."

"Sure," Changmin's attention is firmly on the fire hole. Already the crackling sounds of a fire is issuing from it. He's wrapping the fish in dried palm fronds. "I'll finish these and then come with you."

Yunho gazes at the sight of him, focused, sat cross-legged and head bent. Then he takes a deep breath. "No, it's okay. You stay here and keep at the fish. It's not efficient, I know… I can go alone."

Changmin's head comes up at that. He searches Yunho's face, and goes, "are you sure? I can go with."

Yunho smiles at him helplessly, something soft and tender creeping in him at the sight of Changmin's expression, all concern and a supreme lack of judgement. His mouth feels wobbly. "I'm sure. But. If you don't mind. Do you... think you can sing?" 

He feels absurdly shy saying this to someone who's spent his time singing professionally for more than half his life. 

"It's just so that. I know you're there."

"'Kay," Changmin says after a barely noticeable beat. "Any requests? Our songs? Or do you want to hear covers? No Michael Jackson though. Sorry. Don’t like you that much." 

Yunho feels laughter bubbling up in his throat. It's a foreign but welcome sensation. "I don't know. You surprise me." 

He's through the trees and halfway down the slope when Changmin's voice rises above him. He sings about taking step by step with an unnamed person, for today, and Yunho feels an ache creep up from the tip of his nose to the back of his throat. 

_ Tone _ has always been one of his favourite albums that they've recorded together. 

\--

The refuse hole is relatively easier to dig, because it just needs to be wide and deep for rubbish, and Yunho finishes with speed. He goes for another quick dunk at the creek, since the refuse hole is dug not far from its banks, wandering upstream for some more freshwater, and heads back to camp, freshly rinsed undershirt clutched in hand. 

Changmin’s been busy in the meantime.

Aurally, he’s cycled through the entire _ Tone _ album, and started a little on their ballads in _ Time._ When Yunho isn't out of breath from digging, he joins in at his own parts. Changmin's also laid ragged branches, uniform in their length across the fire hole to act as a rudimentary grill, and two little packets of charred palm fronds are sizzling away happily on it. The sack with the clams and seawater sit in the opposite corner of the campsite, open and hanging from a crude spit, slightly crooked and fashioned from a few sturdy branches and the yarn from his pack.

Yunho darts back into the campsite, heading for the energy bars. He swipes one for himself and prods Changmin into eating another. They have seven left. 

“The fish should be done,” Changmin says around a mouthful of peanut butter, oats, chocolate and honey. “It definitely won’t taste as good as this, though.” 

And it doesn’t. Yunho works his mouth around some stray scaly bits and the flesh has a faint earth-like smell and it’s entirely too bland. But it’s also hot and substantial. By the time he’s picked the bones clean, he feels it’s one of the best meals in his life, and tells Changmin so.

“That’s because you’re starving, you imbecile,” Changmin says, but he looks pleased. 

He sweeps the bones and bits into the crumpled palm fronds and stands, dumping their chopsticks and spoons into their makeshift mess tin. “I’ll go dump this and wash the utensils. Left and down the slope right?” 

“Yeah,” Yunho tells him. “You can’t miss it. Gaping hole, and I gave it a ring of rocks.” 

He makes to get up too, groaning slightly all the while, and Changmin’s brow wrinkles. “Coming with?”

“No,” Yunho says. “I think I should go see if I can find enough rocks so we can form an SOS sign on the beach. It has to be large enough so it can be seen from the air. Do you think we should set a palm tree on fire?”

"And burn down the island while we're at it?" Changmin gives him a long look. “Take a nap,” he decides, “we’ll do that tomorrow together. The rocks, not the wilful arson. In the morning, when there’s plenty of light. It’ll be faster.” 

“Oh,” Yunho ruffles a hand through his semi-dried hair. The ache in his knees and his back makes him mumble a noise of assent and turns towards the comforting shelter of the outcrop. He hesitates after a few steps. “It seems lazy, somehow.”

“You survived a plane crash and set up basic camp in a day and picked shellfish and dug crazy holes and walked around a lot,” Changmin says. “You’ve worked hard enough. Take a nap.” 

And Yunho does as he’s told.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've always played the side-foraging quests in MMOs more than the main storyline
> 
> shim changmin:  
+50 health boost from magical bag  
+20 hunting and gathering skills  
+100 drinking water skills  
+5 rope skills  
+10 cooking skills  
+jung yunho's wide-eyed admiration
> 
> jung yunho:  
+75 king of the island skills (wanting to fight poor unsuspecting cats whilst nekkid hoho)  
+30 speed in digging large holes  
+100 <s>seducing</s> <s>tonguing</s> <s>licking</s> eating coconut skills  
-80 for thinking abt setting palm trees on fire


	3. iii

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last scene in this chapter is very, very special to me. It was the scene that actually kicked off this whole premise, and morphed into coconuts au as it is now, 26.6k in its monstrous finalised form. lol
> 
> to think i actually only wanted to write 3k words of jungyunho being king of the island then manager!shim being actual king of the island..........
> 
> Me, then: /no idea of what I'm getting into/ hey so  
Mouldsee: ?  
Me: im just gonna fling something at you and you tell me if Shim is making sense or he's just spouting nonsensical random words  
Me: /flings it  
Mouldsee: NOT NONSENSICAL RANDOM THINGS AT ALL  
Mouldsee: PLS CONTINUE
> 
> so if you cry just know it's her fault c:  
although I still maintain this fic is the happiest I've written and every scene is just sweet Shim&Jung dynamics.
> 
> also, writing this, i had the most absurd cravings for grilled clams jfc
> 
> Comments are love~ 
> 
> The next chapter will be up either by the time we hit 75 kudos, or until I lose patience and just fling this up so I can concentrate on #officeantics and Sing! Idol. XD

He wakes up some time later, slitting an eye open, and it’s still light. Changmin’s next to him, bent over something again. Yunho had curled up in just his jeans, but now he’s swathed in two giant scarves from head to toe and what feels like their entire wardrobe is tucked up under his head. He shifts and closes his eyes again. 

“Feeling better?” Changmin leans over. He taps on Yunho’s forehead until both eyes open together with a grumble. “Oh, good. Your pupils are finally even.” 

Yunho yawns, sitting up. “They were uneven?”

“I told you when we were making our way here yesterday,” Changmin’s attention returns to whatever is in his hands. “You had a concussion. But at least you were alert and walking and talking properly.” 

Yunho rolls to his feet with a groan. His back is killing him. He cracks his neck and does a couple of dance steps and jumps from Why’s introductory section, to stretch his joints. It makes the pallet of palm fronds vibrate noisily, and Changmin glares at him, “oy! Do that outside!” 

“What are you doing?” He bends to watch, and Changmin’s using a metal spoon to scrape at the interior of half a coconut husk. The clippers and Swiss Army knife lie next to him. Its edges are neatened to form a tidy circle and Yunho sees a few more by his feet. 

“We need containers… from the stuff we have, we only have the metal lunch box. More containers are always useful. I found some rocks too. And it’s good that you’re awake. I want to try something with the palm fronds.” 

Yunho goes back out to the clearing. Changmin has been even busier during his nap. There are a few flattish rocks, roughly a feet across in length. A thin layer of water boils on their surface and they’re laid across the fire pit, which is still crackling. Next to the fire pit is a fresh, large stack of twigs, bark and more dried palm fronds. 

The crude spit that held the clam sack looks more like a rack now, and it’s sitting a little straighter. Gathered at the mouth of the rocky overhang is a large swathe of dark something else. Yunho goes back over and sees it’s similar to the moss they saw earlier. He touches it. It’s dry, and springy to the touch.

Changmin breezes past him with the coconut husk halves under his arm and an armful of crushed fronds - what they’ve been sleeping on, Yunho realises. He nudges the rocks with a trainer clad foot and throws some of the flattened bits into the pit and the rest onto the fire pile by its side, and the fire grows so hot that Yunho can even see a bit of the flames at the lip. It’s near soundless though. 

He pushes the rocks back to cover the pit and slight steam starts rising from them. Nodding in approval, he sets the coconut husk halves out one by one of the largest rock, and uses a remaining one to scoop freshwater from the sack and drip that over the entire contraption. It’s a curious system. 

Yunho scratches his chin. “What…”

Changmin’s ears pinkened. “I’m just cleaning them. Anyway! It’s good that you’re up. I’ll start making dinner.”

“I want to help,” Yunho insists. He takes a closer look and realises Changmin is in a fresh tee, dark grey and his hair is wet. Changmin blinks at him. “Okay. Get the clam sack, I checked just now and they’ve spit up quite a bit of the sand. Go rinse them at the creek and come back.” 

“Oh,” Yunho says. “That simple?”

The look that Changmin levels him with is wry. “It’s not precisely Michelin-star here, Yun.”

Yunho does as instructed, back to the campsite faster than he thought. He waves both a water bottle and the dry sack of very rinsed, very clean clams and a few larger cousins at Changmin, who takes them without a murmur. 

There’s another little palm frond packet at the edge of the flat rock over the fire pit - the last fish. Changmin starts laying out the assorted clams. The fire is hotter than ever, orange flames licking on the sides of the rock. Yunho uncaps the bottle in his hand and edges it until it meets the dark rock with a steamy hiss. The look Changmin slants him is approving. 

They sit like this, no words exchanged, taking bites out of the fish whilst the clams cook, shells popping open individually as they go. The fish is still equally bland and mud-tasting and hot and equally good as lunch had been. 

It’s a surprise, given how they’ve had so much shitty things happen these two days, but the clams are delicious. The fire boils them in their own juices and they’re fresh from the ocean and taste like it, so they’re hot and salty and sweet and Yunho maybe eats more of them than he should.

“Your stomach,” Changmin warns, but he’s the one who keeps nudging the shells over to Yunho anyway, so Yunho just ignores his nattering and eats more. There’s also one or two triangular looking shells, larger mollusks. They’re a bit more fishy-tasting, but still good. Changmin makes a considering noise. “I wonder what these are.”

“The clams are my favourite,” Yunho groans, sipping the last mouthful of juice from one. His fingers are gummy and he licks them, and licks them again. Changmin goes, “yeah, but it’s too bad we don’t have any butter and parsley. Or garlic. Or ginger. Or even just salt and pepper.”

It’s a sobering reminder that they’re not on holiday doing a camping trip together.

Yunho tips the flesh of another clam into his mouth. “Oh! There’s a bottle of oil in your pack. I saw. Stir-fried clams with oil?”

For some reason, Changmin flushes. He looks like a tomato. A tomato with messy wild hair and the slight beginnings of sunburn around his neck. “No! That’s not… That’s not edible. It’s m-massage oil.” 

Yunho isn’t really listening. Replaying what Changmin just said before that, he sits up straighter. He’s got an idea; if he were a cartoon character, there would be a lightbulb going off his head. “Hey, so there’s salt in seawater right? And people can get salt out of seawater. What happens if we do that, and we sprinkle that on the clams? Or… maybe we can boil them in coconut water?”

Changmin’s nose wrinkles at the thought of clam coconut soup, but he makes a thoughtful “hmm” at the idea of salt broiled clams. There is a problem, though. “People use machines in desalination.”

“Yeah, no,” Yunho’s getting excited, rolling up on his heels to balance himself in a crouch instead. “But that’s for industrial production, right? _ People _ have been getting salt out of the sea since ancient times. Don’t they even teach this in high school? You just boil seawater and then when the water’s gone, there’s salt!” 

“It’s a bit more complicated than that-”

“Let’s do that tomorrow,” Yunho interrupts, excitement coursing through him like electricity. “The rock hunting and the SOS and the salt making! Okay? Okay?”

“Okay,” Changmin sighs. His mouth is flattened in a thin line, but his eyes are crinkled unevenly at Yunho. 

\--

Yunho cleans up, bringing the empty shells and rubbish down to the refuse hole. He kicks a thin layer of dirt over the day’s rubbish down the hole, and washes up the utensils and himself. He picks up a few medium sized rocks and dry larger branches, almost logs, before he’s back at camp. 

Changmin’s crouched within the shadow of the outcrop doing something, so Yunho drops the rocks and two large branches down the fire hole. He prods at it with another branch, shifting the bits around to hopefully ensure it’ll burn through the night. Done, he tidies away the utensils and the now rinsed sacks to hang at the rebuilt rack. His boxer briefs, undershirt and Changmin’s washed tee hangs on the other side. 

He pulls the undershirt back on and wanders over, curious at why Changmin’s on all fours. 

The dry moss is being spread out as another makeshift pallet. Changmin’s tucked it up against the edge of the rock wall and spread it out enough that it’s socially acceptable for two full-grown men to sleep on. He turns to see him, and mistaking Yunho’s interest, he explains, “I was testing it just now. It’s a thicker layer compared to the palm, and less easily crushed, I think.” 

“Nice,” Yunho says, and semi-flops on him. He laughs at Changmin’s indignant yell and grabs him in a quick headlock, messing up his too-short hair, before rolling off. 

The moss is springy against his arms. He presses down hard experimentally, then lifts his body a little to see them unfurling again. Changmin ruffles at his hair, face wreathed in an enormous scowl, but the corners of his lips are twitching slightly. He throws a scarf at Yunho’s face.

Because it’s warm, Yunho spreads it over the moss and lies on it. He folds his arms behind his back and squints, rolled jumper tucked against his nape. If he tilts his head and cranes his neck, he can see the night sky. There are stars. 

It’s dark, except for the warm flickering light from the fire pit outside the overhang. Yunho turns on his side. The faint glow throws Changmin’s cheekbones in stark relief. He’s still seated upright against the rock wall behind them, staring at the fire. 

“You know,” Yunho says, shifting back onto his back. There’s an answering hum from Changmin. “If I have to be stranded on a deserted island with questionable chances of survival and cut off from the outside world, you’re the first person I’ll pick to do it together.”

Changmin is quiet. Yunho looks over. There’s a faint upward curve on his lips. 

“I’m glad it’s you.” Yunho says again, serious, fingers worrying at the texture of the scarf. He doesn’t look over again. 

There’s the sound of fabric rustling against fabric, then softly, “Go to sleep, Yun.”

He does. 

\--

They’re both awake at first light, sharing an energy bar and scarfing down two large coconuts each. Changmin retains the husks to clean at night, and it’s slightly easier to break camp today. 

“Fish first or SOS first?” Yunho asks. “Or you fish and I SOS? Or we fish first, then SOS?”

Changmin’s eyebrows twitch. He clearly hasn’t forgotten what he said yesterday. “Option three.” 

The sky looks promising, brightening from drowsy mauve to blue. They’re down at the beach with their sacks, but because of the earlier hour, the tide is still receding, though low enough to walk through. It only comes up to their ankles. Yunho’s come prepared today; he’s made a few jagged branches for Changmin to use, and sliced at the tips with the switchblade till they’re long and sharp. 

But Changmin cocks his head at him and goes, “do you think we should try to keep them alive? So they’re fresher?”

“I don’t think a few hours hurt but… we can try…” Yunho ventures, taking off his trainers, and then they slosh out to promptly spend a fruitless half an hour almost digging at the next large puddle they find with a fish. 

It’s too fast and too slippery for them. Even trapped in the receding shallows, it wriggles out of their grasp countless times to flop down and half-bury itself in murky seawater. They can’t really see it, because they’ve fumbled so much that the puddle is more silt than water, and when they knock their heads together again for the third time, Changmin growls in loud exasperation. “Ugh, let’s just kill it!”

“Wait,” Yunho starts, but Changmin’s already snatched one of the branches from him, arm curving down in a swipe. The stick jams halfway down and he yanks it back up. The strength behind his lunge is so huge that the tip has gone through and through the fish’s eyes on either side of its head. 

Changmin makes a murderous sound of satisfaction and tosses it into the sack in his hand. 

Scratching at the scab on his arm, Yunho says slowly, “did you just… will the fish to impale itself on your stick through the force of your rage alone?” He’s not quite joking.

The question makes Changmin laugh, annoyed yet amused. “Look for the clams and stop talking nonsense!” 

They forage at the wet sand until the tide’s completely receded, and until their sacks are fat with seafood and seawater again. It’s prep time by their trusty little brook, and then they leave the raw supplies back at camp, covered up, before setting out again to the beach. 

The beach near camp is white and flat, so they trek along it, till Yunho’s pretty sure they’re on the other side of the island where the ravine is <strike>where dead things are</strike>. Here, the sand is still white, but it’s a narrower strip that gets rockier, and the water is deeper in a more abrupt slope. 

It also means there are more rocks to choose from, and they pick as many large pieces as they can. The pack is filled almost to the brim and Yunho wrestles Changmin for the right to carry it (“you just recovered from a concussion!”), winning only when he points out it makes it easier for Changmin to vet and choose optimal rocks, because he keeps tsking and flinging away Yunho’s choices. 

They make their way back, the weight of the rocks slowing them both down, and by the time they’re at the beach near camp, the sun is up high and shadows are short. 

Yunho sings the entire piece for OCEAN by himself, then launches into the choreography for Hot Hot Hot. He only stops when Changmin yells at him to cease fooling around lest he trips and bashes his head on their bag of rocks. Beneath his breath, he hums a couple of stanzas of Spinning.

Changmin’s grey tee is sweat stained and his entire front is soaked from flinging water on himself like a lunatic. Yunho takes a pull of water while eyeing him, and suggests, “just take it off.”

“What?” Changmin’s reaction is absurd for a man who strips off to the waist every single touring concert they have. “No!” 

“Why not? You’ll have a farmer’s tan at this rate.” He gestures at himself. He’s long since stripped his undershirt off whilst they were hauling rocks, tucking it at the back of his waistband. “I don’t have abs and I don’t care. It’s too hot to not go topless. You just stripped at the Beijing con last week.”

Both of them pause, feeling slightly adrift at how that is an entirely different world from the present, and it was just last week. 

There’s a spasm by Changmin’s right eye and his jaw is ticking. His ears, to Yunho’s amusement, are turning fire-engine red. “I’m not- this weather is- I’ll burn!”

“No, you won’t,” Yunho taunts, feeling a grin bloom on his own face. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you sneakily applying sunblock everyday.” 

“I, I, I…” It’s a historic event for the ages. Changmin’s at a loss for words, something he never is when they argue these days. Yunho chuckles and offloads the bag, unpacking the rocks.

He’s forming the top curve of the “S”, shifting the rocks around, when Changmin grumbles something unintelligibly and shrilly. Bending over the pack again, Yunho sees jean clad thighs in his peripheral vision. 

He picks up a rock and straightens, eyes widening as he looks up.... and up… and up… 

His gaze slows, and is stuck.

At the strip of hair extending from Changmin’s navel, and down. 

At rippling muscles, unforgiving and hard, lightly tanned skin. 

Changmin’s never been broad-chested, being of a naturally lean and slim build. But years of working out and living and eating well have given a firm definition and decided solidity to his upper torso. 

His nipples are flat, and copper-coloured. Yunho hasn’t looked at them from such a close distance before. 

Maybe this hasn’t been one of his better ideas. 

He shouldn’t have taunted Changmin. 

Changmin’s clavicles are slashing strokes against his shoulders, and glossy with sweat. As Yunho stares, a bead of perspiration forms, rolling from the hollow of his throat and over a stark collar bone. It lingers in the defined valley between his pectorals, undecided, before giving up the ghost and slipping down to disappear in his belly button. 

Yunho tears his eyes upward. 

Changmin’s eyes are direct on his, challenging. 

“Yeah,” Yunho croaks. “See? Nothing to worry about. Better than mine.” He flaps a hand wildly in his own abdominal region and grabs a rock unseeingly, walking very fast to where the “O” should be. 

His jeans are so uncomfortably tight that he’s surprised he can still bend over in them. 

They work in silence, heavy with an indescribable emotion. Yunho knows it well. This silence is an old friend, one they’ve encountered many times over many years, super-charged and almost unbearably thick. 

He’s always been terrified to break it. And Changmin hasn’t pushed.

\--

They run out of rocks before the entire “SOS” is formed. Currently it looks more like a slightly lopsided “SOC”. 

Yunho starts in the direction of the other side of the island, intent on carrying an entire mountain-load of rocks or until his back breaks or until he is so exhausted that he can just lie down and go to sleep and lock the last hour away into yet another dark dusty part of his psyche, but Changmin catches at his arm. 

“Let’s go back to camp,” he says, soft.

He drags a calloused thumb over the point of Yunho’s elbow. Yunho feels his skin erupt in goosebumps. “Time for lunch. We can gather more rocks again later.” 

Yunho swallows. His voice is an unattractive croak. “I’ll help.” 

\--

They have lunch, and it’s a busy afternoon of hauling and re-hauling rocks, until the “SOS” sign is fully formed. It’s huge, and if Yunho lies down next to it, he only takes up a third of the length of the “S”. He hopes this is visible from the air. 

He gets up again to rearrange it, and rearrange again obsessively, until Changmin comes and hauls him away by the seat of his jeans. “It’ll keep. Stop it, it’ll keep.”

Then it’s dinner and a blur of supplies check and helping Changmin make more coconut bowls and strengthening the rack and building another one and boiling water for breakfast, before the stars come out and then there’s nothing to do but sleep. 

\--

Yunho drags Changmin along to make three more giant SOS signs, one for each side of the island. He adds a “Yunho and Changmin” to the signs, then edits it to say “Changmin and Yunho”. Then he scrapes it completely when Changmin complains he’s using up all the medium sized rocks on the island, which can be better used for actual survival things. 

He changes them to say “SOS! HELP” instead. Changmin points out he could have saved four exclamation marks’ worth of rocks and just break the message into two lines.

They listen and listen and listen while they work at the beaches, but the ocean is silent except for the sound of waves. 

It rains one afternoon, a sudden summer tempest, and Yunho spends the entire time terrified that the rain has washed the rocks away, and washed all vestiges of the two of them reaching out to the outside world away. 

The rocky outcrop keeps rain away exceedingly well, save for a halo of damp seeping in from the mouth, and Changmin’s careful to move all their more fragile supplies, like the fire-making pile and clothing, to the very back of the outcrop, where they sit snug and dry next to springy moss. Then he thinks better of it and moves everything else that’s also better off dry to the back. 

Yunho’s forbidden from stepping out from under the overhang (“no, I know you’ll head off down to the beaches again and I don’t have the patience to stop you!”), so he busies himself with tidying the supplies and helping to weave palm fronds into little ready packets, his version slightly more raggedy than Changmin’s, whilst the man himself dashes out into the light rain. 

Dragging one of the larger rocks, he covers the fire pit, and brings their rack under shelter, so that their laundry stay marginally dry. Today it’s larger and sitting straight on the ground, holding two pairs of boxer briefs, a jumper, a jacket and a tee. He lifts the jumper and jacket and tosses them to Yunho, who catches and rolls them up safely. 

Changmin’s got an umbrella with him, and something about the contrast of it makes Yunho wants to laugh and cry at the same time- the elegant grey umbrella, sturdy with eight spokes, held up by an unshaven Changmin with thick stubble, chapped lips and a deepening tan, in rolled up jeans and bare feet because he doesn't want to live with damp socks and shoes. 

He does laugh, when Changmin lines up his army of coconut bowls on the damp earth and ties the mouths of the water bottles to the sturdier branches of trees fencing them in. “For rainwater,” he says, when he turns around and sees Yunho laughing on his side, legs akimbo on the moss. “Rainwater is also freshwater, stop laughing like the village idiot and keep folding those packets!” 

Damp all over, he strips off to his boxer briefs, and Yunho stops laughing to hastily lower his eyes back to the messy frond configuration in his hands. Anything to avoid staring at all that black and gold. 

It doesn’t quite descend into a storm, but it rains steadily for the rest of the afternoon, and it never lightens again but instead slips quietly into dusk. Changmin’s made use of his two infinitely useful umbrellas and props one over the fire pit, and uses his rocks to build a simple box-structure that functions as a crude sheltered stove.

He appropriates some of his bowls and pours the fresh rainwater into the two mess tins, dropping rinsed clams into it, placing them onto the flattish rock. Steam curls lazy tendrils about his fingers and downturned face, sharp with concentration. 

Yunho thinks that makes Changmin look like a primeval jungle god, like something out of a cave painting, sketched by awed prehistoric men and then tucked away, forgotten by time. 

Then he blinks, and the image is lost when Changmin grumbles and brings the umbrella back up over his own head. 

He places a few other clams as is, on the rock. The sight draws Yunho nearer to the lip of the overhang. Then he remembers his own joking suggestion days back, about clam coconut soup. “Changdol,” he crows, delighted, “Changdol, are you making soup?” 

Changmin looks back at him and grins. “Well. It’s perfect weather for soup.”

Yunho whoops, suddenly homesick and absolutely craving for good piping hot soup. “What can I do? How do you want me to help?” 

“Go open a coconut for me,” Changmin orders, and Yunho’s already scampering to obey. He uses their switchblade to slide along the seam as Changmin had taught, and twists it into two relatively neat halves, only minimally spilling the coconut water.

Changmin gestures for half, so Yunho passes it to him, where he sits it on the hot rock, as well. The other half, they share in sips, then Changmin has Yunho carve up the coconut flesh in long strips. The juice when boiling is added to both mess tins, whilst the long white strips are laid out to grill next to the opening clams. 

Recently, because of their frequent trips to the rockier shoreline on the other side of the island, Changmin’s spotted kelp and seaweed floating amongst the larger, half-submerged rocks. 

They had debated about harvesting it, uncertain if it might be poisonous. Yunho is the one who insists that it must not be, if their culture has a tradition of drinking seaweed soup on birthdays. Why would anyone in their right mind ingest poison on their own birthday? 

In any case, they pick the green flat kelp to bring back to camp, Changmin choosing rooted, fresh specimens that look as close as what they may find in a shabu-shabu restaurant. Yunho fetches some for him now, originally hung to dry on one end of the rack, and Changmin slices up a couple fronds to add to the soup in the tins. 

Afterwards, they sit against the rock wall and drink from the mess tins. The patter of rainwater and subsequent hiss as it hits the stove-and-pit is a comforting sound. 

Changmin’s tossed in clam juice and flesh from the grilled clams in, as well as the grilled coconut, so the broth is strong and tastes salty-sweet like the ocean, with a smoky tinge from the coconut. The kelp is bouncy, bringing its own flavour, and Yunho can’t quite decide what he likes best. 

“This is actually so, so _good_,” he moans, when he scrapes the bottom of the tin. He nudges Changmin, “When we go back, Changdol, promise me you’ll open a restaurant and put this on the menu.” 

Changmin scoffs, but Yunho can see he’s hiding a smile, burying it into the metal in front of him. “That’s just because you have no taste in food, Yun. This is literally things thrown in together and boiled.” 

“Isn’t that the whole point of soup?” Yunho knocks a shoulder against his. It’s still raining, and his belly is warm and full, like his heart. 

\--

  
Changmin’s sacrificed one of his eyeliner pencils (“Not like I need them, on this island”) to count the days off in slashes on the rock wall.

Yunho snatches it from him and draws two stick figures beside, lopsided with too-big circles for heads and stumpy legs. They both have giant smiley faces. 

\--

Their phones die, batteries struggling till the very last breath. 

When his phone shuts down at one percent, Changmin still has it open on Maps. Before his phone dies, Yunho makes Changmin take a series of selfies together with him. “So we have it down on record somewhere,” he insists. Changmin just arches both eyebrows and gestures around their camp in mute counterpoint. 

Slipping his phone into the supply pile of oddities, which includes oil and books, Yunho looks at Changmin. “I wonder how they are. Parents. Sooyeon and Jiyeon and Jihye.” 

Changmin’s face is smooth, but by his sides, his hands have tightened into fists. “Do you want me to be honest?”

“Do you need the answer to that? Yunho asks him in return. “You’re the only person I always trust to be honest with me.”

His head ducks at that, but Yunho knows Changmin is smiling again. He looks up again, and at Yunho.

“I actually hope they think we are dead,” Changmin says near inaudibly. “Better than wondering and not knowing.” 

“I don’t think they’ll give up hope so easily,” Yunho says, fiddling with a branch. He’s trying to use the Swiss Army knife to whittle it into a neater shape with a sharp tip, so Changmin can get more than one use out of it. 

The other day by the rocks at shore, they had spotted a stingray, but couldn’t quite fish it because nothing they had was sturdy enough to spear it. 

“I know,” Changmin sighs. “But_ I _ can hope, can’t I?” 

\--

One day, Yunho wakes up with a deep and abject terror that they will eventually be rescued but by then they’ve forgotten all their choreography and they go back to civilisation but everyone hates them and thinks they’re a failure who should be better off cast away. 

Something in the set of his shoulders must have given him away. Changmin pries and pries and cajoles and chips away at him until Yunho blurts the entire thing out, messy and disjointed and neurotic. 

Changmin falls silent then. But after breakfast and their morning forage, he pulls Yunho to a clearing by the creek and then they spent three hours dancing through the entire repertoire in the first set of their Begin Again album. 

Yunho realises with relief that some movements are simply muscle memory now.

Changmin just laughs at him when he reenacts Yunho’s head banging move at the end of Rising Sun with more vigour than Yunho himself. 

After that day, they devote at least two hours either in the early morning or late afternoon, for their performance-driven numbers. 

“It’s just good exercise,” Changmin defends himself when Yunho questions him about even making this suggestion, but his reddened ears give him away.

\--

They don’t talk about the ravine, until they do. 

Changmin brings it up on their fourteenth day on the island. “We should go,” he says.

“No.” Yunho doesn’t look at him.

“We should go,” Changmin repeats, unfazed when Yunho’s head snapes up to issue a glare at him. “No, think of it this way. I know it was traumatic; and it’s been two weeks, so it’s probably gotten uglier. But you remember seeing things that were intact there, right? Seats, fuselage.”

He gestures around their campsite - they’ve just come back from laundry duty by the creek. “Don’t you want to see if there’s something we can repurpose to keep the rain out even further? Don’t you see if there are any crates we can use, to catch more rainwater so we don’t need to keep going back and forth to the brook every fifteen minutes we finish a bottle of water? Don’t you want to see if there’s clothes and stuff and just things that can _ help _ us?” 

“We have your pack, and our supplies,” Yunho retorts, and immediately hears for himself how childish he sounds. “We don’t need them. We’ll be rescued.”

“I think any additional supplies will be good for us in this scenario,” Changmin says softly, a hint of a hard edge in his voice. Yunho just stares at him. Changmin gazes back, open, defiant.

Yunho caves first, as always. “Fine. We'll go."

\--

They smell the wreckage before they are even near. They’re in the jungle, and Yunho can still sees the marks he’s made with the marker, black and distinct against the trees. The pack is nearly empty, just carrying a bit of food and water supply for the two of them in potential anticipation for new supplies, but Yunho feels it weighing down on his shoulders every step he takes. 

Here and there, the jungle shows signs of how the crash has affected it, even after two weeks. They must have skidded. Yunho didn't realise. Holes in the canopy, splintered tree trunks, flattened shrubbery all tell the same tale of wanton destruction. The air, for once, doesn't taste of the sea. 

“Damn,” Changmin says after a moment. He’s breathing through his mouth. “That’s nasty.”

“Not far now,” Yunho says. “Less than a klick definitely. Maybe five hundred metres more.” They trek closer, the rancid air curdling in their nostrils. He’s brought an extra tee along. He reaches over, and ties it around Changmin’s face. 

They come to the lip of the ravine. It looks worse than Yunho remembers.

He lags behind Changmin, who half-walks, half-slides down the short slope. The heat and the few rainstorms they’ve had clearly haven’t been kind to the wreckage. 

Most of the seats and the bulky pieces of the plane as still as he remembers, but the bodies are. The bodies are. Well, the bodies _ aren’t_. 

Yunho feels revulsion crawl through him, a hot tide rising from his throat, and he spins around very fast before he loses this morning’s breakfast of kelp and wild figs. 

From the quick glimpse he had gotten, the bodies have gotten bad, even as the clothes are still relatively intact. 

Changmin’s still silent. Yunho turns a little, keeping his head fixed so he only sees Changmin. He’s got his head cocked, sharp gaze darting between the mangled brown lump crawling with insects, and the even more fetid pile at the nose of the plane. 

Yunho’s not surprised Changmin’s come prepared. He even pulls on a pair of surgical gloves, no doubt from his first aid kit. 

Changmin’s jaw tenses, and he straightens his shoulders. He reaches out to the body in the seats.

“What are you doing!” Yunho whirls around to slap his hand away.

“We need clothing. It’s sunny right now, but we still don’t know if this place is temperate or tropical. They don’t need it anymore.” The entire set of Changmin’s face is hard, his jaw practically granite. 

It makes sense. There’s logic in it. It also ignited a bone-deep sense of nauseated repugnance in him. “I can’t…” 

Changmin softens. “It’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that… we know them. Knew them.”

“And we still do. Only this isn’t them anymore. Life is ephemeral and as they’ve moved on. They are now in a stage where they don’t need such essentials. But we do.”

Yunho huffs a little laugh, “I always forget that you’re Buddhist.”

Changmin doesn’t reply. He focuses on stripping the pieces of clothing, movements methodical and measured. Not much is usable, anyway. Perhaps the jeans, and the shoes, but the shoes are impractical loafers. Only the faint wrinkle of his nose and the tiny aborted jerks of his head betray his discomfort at the smell and the buzzing flies and at what his hands must be feeling right now. 

He finishes, and moves upfront the plane. There are a lot less things salvageable, and it doesn’t even look vaguely human-like anymore. “I don’t think it’s precisely because of Buddhist teachings,” he says after a prolonged pause. “I think I am just a pessimist.”

“A realist,” Yunho counters. “Pragmatic.” 

Changmin lifts one shoulder in a shrug, incongruously elegant give his current task at hand. “Whichever. But we’re not in the greatest situation ourselves, and we need all the help we can get. They’re beyond our capabilities to help. It’s not a hard decision to make.”

He makes a curious sound of triumph. What had used to be the pilot hasn’t been much of a help, but there is a toolbox affixed next to him, beneath the controls, similar to a car’s glove box. Next to it, is a small box that contains something that feels canvas-like and is red. 

Changmin takes both. 

“I wish I can do that too,” Yunho says. He moves on the other side of the wreckage, at the crumpled pile he had noticed the first day. It is mostly fuselage as he had thought, but it’s also a portion of the cargo hold. He focuses on stacking all the rope he can find, as well as the life jackets and the giant piece of oilskin tarp from the cargo section, into a mostly-unspoiled plastic crate he’s found half embedded into the earth. 

There’s a lidded cooler, with broken bottles of champagne. He dumps the liquid out and replaces the broken bottles; they’re sharp, and the two of them probably can find a use for them. He takes the other smaller, empty cooler next to it, too. “I feel useless.” 

Changmin spins around quickly, agitated. He doesn’t reach out, mindful of what his hands have touched and what’s on them now. “Don’t say that. Never say that.” 

“Why not? Come on, Changmin… we both know you’ve been the one prodding me along. Keeping me alive. The so called great leader of TVXQ, full marks on make-believe training situations, but an absolute failure when disaster scenarios turn into real life. I only have nonsensical ideas about building distress signals in the sand and wasting our precious supplies and messing up our meagre stock. I can’t even fold palm frond packets correctly.” 

“Stop it,” Changmin hisses, cutting him off. “Don’t you get it? I can do all these,” he jerks his chin angrily towards their surroundings, “because it’s you. Because you’re you.”

They stare at each other.

Changmin makes a frustrated, broken noise. “I’m not good with saying… words like that, Yunho. You know that. But because it’s you. That’s why I can. That’s why. So you have to be you. Don’t… There’s no need for you to do what I can do. Because there’s me. But I need you to be you.” 

Yunho doesn’t know what to say.

Changmin shuffles closer.

His body is bent awkwardly; he’s twisting his torso so Yunho doesn’t have to see his hands. Changmin coddles him too much.

“You start things, and I finish them. That’s us in the past and us now and us till we’re dead. I’m good at these things. I know. I made sure I am. But you have to remember, you have to know, it’s only because it’s you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Their phones die, batteries struggling till the very last breath." this is the true horror story
> 
> \--
> 
> Keep an eye out tonight:  
Analog Trip premiere (9 Oct 10pm KST)  
https://www. youtube.com/user/SMTOWN/featured
> 
> #GUILTY youtu. be/1XLxZ5rJzQs  
#toho15th #XV #東方神起
> 
> Comments are love.


	4. iv

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think there's something wrong with my brain, because I feel this fic is tooth-rottingly sweet but yet everyone is like this is heartbreaking/scary/sad etc. /o\ Hopefully this chapter disabuses everyone of that notion!!!!!!!!
> 
> It's amazing that Analog Trip is (and I applaud it) exploring Jung's PTSD with a more sensitive outlook of things rather than the "I FORCED MYSELF THROUGH IT" bulldozing, which is never a good idea..... /certified psych RA in the past in case anyone yells at me
> 
> Anyway.
> 
> This was called "coconuts au" "island au" for the longest time, and I was seriously deliberating naming it "Cast Away" (lol how original). But I was looping both Forever Love (Nissan Stadium ver.) and Love Line while writing this, and then at _this_ chapter's final scene, it birthed the title, which is also the transliterated first line from Forever Love. 
> 
> Suggested track whilst reading: https://youtu.be/cMMDrQRgmi0  
Credit: encoded by myheart1027, uploaded by Thắng Lê and owned by Avex/SM. Song rights are Yoshiki and X-Japan's.
> 
> Comments and concrit are always welcome.

“We should bury them,” Yunho says blankly, when they’ve clambered up the ravine and are stood looking down. He can see what’s left of the pilot from here. “But I kind of also… don’t want you to touch them anymore. I want to put you into the creek and scrub you clean and put you in the sea to rinse and then put you in the creek again to soak one more time. I don’t know why you took the jeans. I’m never going to allow you to let them touch your skin.”

Changmin ignores Yunho’s bout of verbal diarrhoea. “It’s fine,” he murmurs after a moment. “We’ll let the sky bury them.”

They turn to go. They don’t come back to the ravine again, even after a long time. 

\--

They fall into a routine somehow, improbable as it sounds.

The slashes Changmin marks off on the wall grows, and keep growing. They wear the eyeliner down to a stub, then Changmin replaces it with a brow pencil. 

He adds a roughly scribbled map next to the columns of slashes, marking out the places like the ravine, which sits west, and the rocky shore with kelp, which is more north-east. Their camp feels like it leans east, because their daily low-tide forages (“trips to Tsukiji Market,” Changmin jokes) nearly always feature a low-hanging morning sun. 

It means their trusty little brook probably has its source lower south, where the jungle foliage blooms the lushest and the wild birds gather in large swathes. 

Yunho finally convinces Changmin to start using the pack of disposable razors, since they now had knives from the plane to add to their collection, too. 

Changmin shaves and runs a grateful hand over his chin, “Agh, yes, this feels naked but in a good way.”

He makes Yunho shave too, but Yunho’s beard growth is sparse compared to Changmin’s. In the end, in an effort to compromise and also make the razors last as long as possible, they make a pact to shave weekly. 

Yunho starts on his Project Salt with unbridled enthusiasm, and promptly fails the first two tries. The first try, he tries to heat seawater in a coconut husk, but never quite gets the rim of fine white salt he was envisioning. 

The second time, he had borrowed flat rocks from Changmin and tried to pour seawater on them, but boiling it straight out like that just turned salt into a thin white film on the rock that doesn’t come off. It makes grilling kelp on it delicious, though. Changmin calls it “the salt table”.

The third time, he stops and thinks very hard, sorting possible scenarios in his head. He takes the larger mess tin from Changmin to boil a pan of seawater, stopping when there’s about a centimetre of water left. 

Then he pours it into a biggish rock with a natural dip in its middle, and carries it down to the beach and leaves it there. 

He visits it multiple times daily, but the water level goes down too slowly. On the third day, however, it’s blazing hot without a single cloud in the deep blue sky. Yunho clatters down to the beach and there’s no water in his rock, just a crusty white sediment that looks like semi-transparent gravel, when he rubs it together with two fingers. 

“Changdol, look,” Yunho babbles. “It’s salt! We have salt.”

The smile that Changmin aims at him is impossibly fond. “I never doubted for a second that you’ll be able to do it.”

\--

Changmin insists that they shouldn’t rely so much on the sea for their diet, because humans are omnivores and there’s mercury in seafood everywhere no matter how fresh. Never mind the fact that they are literally living from farm to table; or from sea to table, for the matter.

“There is an entire jungle out there for our taking,” he comes after Yunho for the umpteenth time. “It just doesn’t make sense for us to not use it.”

So Yunho allows himself to be pulled along by Changmin to have a go at the jungle. They’re relatively bundled up today, in an effort to deter insects and to minimise contact with possibly poisonous flora. 

Both of them now venture down to the beach in only boxer briefs in the morning, because their jeans have been through a lot and Yunho’s jeans have taken to fraying at the knees.

The first time Changmin gives his own pair - much better maintained- to Yunho and puts on their dead manager’s jeans, Yunho throws such an epic fit that they don’t speak to each other for two days. 

Then Yunho catches Changmin trying to mend the scuffed knees on his pair, and their hanging rack (which has since grown into a monster complete with shelves) now feature sturdy denim strips enforcing their joints. 

He tugs the tiny sewing box away from Changmin roughly, eyes stinging. “Leave it,” he says, gruff. “It’s a natural distressed look. Isn’t that what people pay for? Don’t break the needles. Your sewing kit was meant for indigestion, anyway.”

Changmin eyes him warily, but when dinner time comes, and Yunho piles more salt-grilled fish into his mess tin, he picks out a beautiful wedge from the cheeks and puts it back into Yunho’s. 

\--

Result. 

They’re deep in a cluster of trees, and Yunho’s in his jumper and jeans, with trainers and socks on and rumpled gloves padded with linen on his hands. He’s holding onto four of the spear-branches he’s made for Changmin. 

Changmin’s put on the linen jacket, remarkably well kept despite the back being a full three inches shorter since he keeps repurposing the linen for more practical measures. He’s got Yunho’s undershirt beneath, insisting that their tees don’t work in the heat and he doesn’t want to cook himself alive in two full layers. Even with the lighter under-layer, he’s already sweating in the humidity. 

Yunho keeps his gaze resolutely at Changmin’s neck and above, but it doesn’t help because there are beads of sweat trickling down the faint rise of tendons in his neck and into the hollow of his throat. 

He firmly decides to just not look at Changmin at all. 

At the moment they’re both staring at a bizarrely colourful jungle bird with an extremely large beak. It’s got its head cocked to the side, one beady green eye aimed at them. The branch it’s on is barely above their heads, but it’s absolutely fearless. Its gaze seems to say,_ hey intruder, scram now before I get nasty._

“Pelican,” Yunho decides, after digging his brain for bird names. “They’ve got large beaks, don’t they?” 

Changmin aims a disgusted look at him. “What are you talking about? This doesn’t even look like a pelican. It’s obviously a toucan of some sort.” 

Yunho frowns and thinks. “Didn’t we see that in some menagerie in Indonesia? Aren’t they black and white? With huge orange beaks.”

They look back at the bird with a questionable identity. Its beak is a violent yellow. 

“Yeah, but it’s definitely not a pelican,” Changmin says. “Those are fishing birds! And white! Why would they be in a tree?” 

“I’m sure the pelicans will like it if you don’t write off their free will and decide on their behalf deeply personal life-affecting choices like where they should live,” Yunho counters primly, but Changmin’s clearly bent on ignoring him, because he asks apropos of nothing, “do you think the meat’s good?”

“What?”

“This one.” He nods towards the bird, who’s still eyeing them but has since shifted on the branch. Maybe it understands Korean. “It doesn’t look very fat though...” 

Clearly the bird understands Korean. It gives a loud displeased caw and takes off, its wingspan nearly slapping Changmin in the face, had he not duck with a curse. 

Yunho just laughs at him. 

Changmin makes a face at him and grouses, trudging on, poking disconsolately at the tree trunks, “yeah, yeah, yuk it up, don’t tell me you don’t miss meat.”

“Changmin ah, do you want to eat meat?” Yunho asks him, whiplash mood and drop dead serious. “If you do, hyung will get you meat. Hyung will get you an entire spit-full of meat.”

Changmin looks back quickly. Whatever he finds on Yunho’s face is enough to make him flush, because he rolls his eyes and goes, “oh, fuck, chill, Yun. Please don’t run downhill screaming at the top of your lungs and kill some poor pigeon with your bare hands just so you can prove a point.” 

“I haven’t seen any pigeons yet,” Yunho says, mild again, “I don’t think they live in jungles.” 

“You know what I mean,” Changmin flaps a hand, but draws nearer to a tree. He’s gazing at the base of it, at some wide triangular leaves waving on thin stalks. The leaves have clearly been eaten by caterpillars and other enterprising insects. He crouches down, mindful of not treading on any hidden ant hills, and pulls a stalk to brush deliberately against his arm.

He waits. 

Yunho looks around the tree cluster they’re in, content to observe and also watch Changmin. Minutes pass, and Changmin clearly doesn’t feel itchy, so he crouches again, brushing aside the stalks and feeling around the dirt. 

He digs a little, and laughs, “I thought so!” 

Then he pulls something up for Yunho to see. The plants roots are large and turgid, tubers of some sort. Changmin plucks a few, careful to leave enough so the plant can continue to grow. Wrapping them in palm fronds, he packs it into their trusty bag. “If it’s good, I’ll come back to get some cuttings so they can grow nearer to camp.” 

Pulling out a green eyeliner pencil, he makes a large star marking on the trunk of the tree above it and fills it with colour. He’s concentrated on his work, so he doesn’t notice when Yunho turns away. 

He only looks up in alarm when Yunho jumps with a rustle, crowing loudly. “What the- Are you okay?”

Yunho grins at him, triumphant, drunk with success. “I told you I’ll get you meat.”

Changmin shoulders the pack hastily and jogs over. “Fuck, did you really kill a bird with your bare hands-” Then he stops short.

“Not a bird,” Yunho waves the branch decorated with his prize at him cheerily. It’s still in its death throes, coiling. He’s driven the sharpened end of the branch into the exact middle of the top of its head, where its brain is located. 

“You. That’s a. Seriously?” Changmin’s eyes are so wide, they’re almost bulging out of their sockets. “_Seriously_? There’s over-acheiving and there’s plain stupid, Jung Yunho!” 

“I told you I’ll get you meat,” Yunho repeats, feeling at the top of the world. He knows he should feel penitent, especially when Changmin stalks over and glares at him nose-to-nose, but he’s too happy over the lucky kill. 

The poor thing was asleep amongst some branches, otherwise Yunho wouldn’t have gotten the better of it. He can’t bring himself to feel much pity, though. 

If Changmin scowls any harder, his eyebrows would be piled together. He looks like he’s having a heart attack. “It could have bitten you. We don’t have anything that can protect against the venom of a snake bite, Jung-ssi!” 

“Nah,” Yunho reassures him hastily. Between them, the snake has gone limp. “It’s a python. See? No bright colours, the head’s not triangular, the skin is a net like pattern, no gland sacs. Don’t worry, it’s a python. My platoon did an exercise in Myanmar with APAC troops before. They taught us how to identify them. It’s a python. They’re not venomous. At most it would have just hurt like a bitch and you’ll get to shout at me again and wave the first aid kit around.” 

“Is this when you put your much vaunted survivalist training into practice,” Changmin growls. He’s trying to make a visible effort in calming himself, but Yunho sees he’s still white-knuckled. 

Yunho starts to feel faint stirrings of guilt. 

The python’s now dead, so he drives another spear-branch three inches from its tail’s end and coils it up. He reaches out a hand to pat at Changmin’s jacket clad arm. “Sorry, Changdol. I was being careful. I promise.”

“You’re gutting the goddamned thing,” Changmin says, and turns to power-walk angrily to the next jungly bit. 

\--

Yunho takes care of the field dressing. Typically Changmin’s the one who does the prep on their seafood, so this is the least he can do. Plus Changmin’s clearly still angry, from his jerky movements by the creek, where he’s scrubbing away with excess vigour at the tubers. 

Picking a good spot amongst the sparse grass, dry, Yunho takes out their new hunting knife and hunkers down. He hacks the python’s head off, some inches behind the start of its spine. He tosses the head into the bushes some distance away. No doubt some enterprising animal will have a good dinner tonight. 

The new knife is large and sharp. He barely has to put any strength behind his cut; he just needs to let the knife do the work. Slitting the belly, he guts it and removes the innards, flinging them in the same bushes. Then he removes the tail tip and flips it upside down to let the blood drain completely. 

Both his hands are dirty. He wanders back over to the creek, but he doesn’t have anything to hold water with. Changmin doesn’t look at him, but he swishes a sack through the rushing water and passes it to Yunho without a word. 

“Thanks,” Yunho murmurs, absurdly grateful. He turns back to the half-prepped meat and finds the vent, trimming lengthwise at the tendons. It’s a decent-sized snake, not too large, but approximately four feet long. It’ll last them for a while - Yunho’s got a reserve of salt now, so he wants to try and see if he can preserve the extra cuts. 

Rinsing it, he takes hold and pulls; the skin and flesh separates, and he makes quick work of butchering the meat into portion-sized cuts. 

He goes over to crouch by Changmin again. Holding out the rinsed skin, edges neatened, he nudges at Changmin lightly and jokes, “it’s not quite a Hermès Birkin, but…” 

A snort escapes the younger man, but he takes the bait. “Is this for next year’s spring/summer collection? What a minimalist design.” 

Emboldened, Yunho leans into him. “I hear the waiting list is for years and years.” 

“Isn’t it one of kind? Limited edition,” Changmin’s gotten the tubers very clean. They’re close together, shoulder-to-elbow. It’s enough.

\--

Sometimes Yunho looks at the slashes on the wall and gets panic attacks. It’s Changmin’s palm against his back, warm and solid and infinitely reassuring, that helps him breathe again.

He doesn’t dare to count them like Changmin does - Changmin has a calendar in his head and probably knows the exact number of months, days, hours they’ve been cast away. Yunho doesn’t want that number. Even the fuzzy knowledge that it’s been months, that they’ve been lost for months and months and either no one’s coming for them or they don’t know how to come for them or they think they’re already dead - even when his thoughts touch on that, he feels his breath fracturing again. 

In one of his blacker moods, he blurts out, “maybe they’ve already forgotten us. Maybe that’s why no one is coming.” 

Changmin just looks at him, serene. “Think about what you just said, and I dare you to say it again. With conviction, this time.” 

Yunho flushes. 

Changmin offers to erase the slashes. Yunho doesn’t allow him to. “No,” he mutters, “one of us should know. I’m just sorry I’m not strong enough.” 

That interrupts Changmin’s serenity then, makes Changmin so angry that he stomps off to spear two stingrays on his own, and Yunho gets terrified all over again when he thinks about how he was very, very, very, very lucky in the beginning, because the ocean gave Changmin back. 

He doesn’t apologise because he still can’t quite understand why Changmin gets furious when Yunho admits his own personal failings. 

But he does take over the prep for the stingrays, and makes Changmin grilled wild sweet potatoes, salted to perfection. 

\--

It’s one day after the next, and they would have just continued on like that, if Yunho hadn’t gone stupid with excitement that particular day. 

In hindsight, it probably couldn’t have been helped. 

It’s been a long time coming, anyway. Two decades of unresolved tension, of fragile things they don’t talk about, until it’s literally just the two of them against the world and they only have each other for company. 

He’s caught his first proper fish, rather than their tried-and-true method of trapping within the shallows. They’d gone their separate ways that morning. Changmin wanted to forage for more edible leaves and tubers, because he was concerned about the lack of consistent fibre in their diet. 

There was only so many days a man could eat kelp for to ensure a healthy gut even in such primitive conditions. They tried boiling coconut fibre, but it only took one lunch before they gagged on it and then out of mutual agreement concur never to do that again. 

In any case, Changmin’s gone to the jungle, whilst Yunho decided to amuse himself by the beach. He goes and edits his SOS signs, lengthening them, and then gets it into his head to try proper fishing. 

They’ve got supplies now, to do a very crude form of fly fishing. The small box Changmin had found in the ravine, by the flight controls, turned out to contain a one-man parachute pack. The elongated chute body has been utilised for what is now their sleeping quarters since it’s thick and waterproof, and with moss beneath it, Yunho finds he doesn’t wake up every morning with a sore back. The pilot chute has since been tweaked to become a mini-canopy for their fire-pit and stove, but Changmin’s hacked off the strings for them to use whenever.

Yunho cuts a length of the string, grabs a couple of spear-branches, the Swiss Army knife, an unopened coconut and the mini-cooler. He pops by the beach near camp to get a handful of mollusks, large enough for a fish to want to nibble, takes a cursory look at his salt pans, and line of curing fish, and sets off for the north-east side of the island, whistling. 

He makes his way onto the rocks and balances the cooler on the largest one, an impromptu table in nature. 

The ocean spray feels amazing on his skin. He’s forgone the undershirt again today, clad only in his jeans and trainers, without socks. Taking his trainers off, he shelves them far, because wet trainers will get him scolded by Changmin again. 

He dangles a foot into the cool water, then pulls it up to focus on the business at hand. 

Crouching down on his haunches, he coils and ties one end of the string to the tip of the spear branch. On the other end of the string, he flips open his knife and wedges the mollusk’s shell open. It’s a decent size, still wriggling and about the length of his index finger, so Yunho wraps the end of the string around it and traps it in a dead knot. 

There’s a slight breeze today. He casts. 

There’s nothing much to do whilst he waits, and Yunho realises with a start that he should have brought one of Changmin’s books along for his own amusement. They’re packed away in the larger cooler, along with supplies that should be kept very dry, such as their flints and fire-starters, because Changmin had bitched about sea air being absolutely shit for his books. 

He twiddles his thumbs a little. Then remembers that he can collect kelp for dinner. 

Yunho’s on his knees, jeans off and in his boxer briefs and pulling up kelp, when he sees movement from the corner of his eye. 

It’s the branch. It’s shifting on the rock Yunho has rested it against. Yunho drops the kelp and scrambles over, chanting “please don’t be floating kelp, please don’t be floating kelp, please please please please.”

He’s too enthusiastic in yanking at his impromptu fishing rod. The string flies, and a fish's head pops out of the water.

“_Whoa_,” he breathes, and drops the branch. Wrapping one hand around the string, he tugs it in like he would in a game of tug-of-war, since he doesn’t have a reel. 

It’s a small fish, barely longer than his palm and perhaps in the civilised world it’s nothing to write home about. But Yunho feels as though his entire world has lit up in sparkling positivity. They’re here and they were helpless and he was terrified but now he’s managed to catch a fish with his bare hands and to him it’s like a testament of how far they’ve come since he woke up with blood in his eyes and trapped in a mangled seat and no Changmin beside him. 

Well, okay, the fish wasn’t quite caught with his bare hands. But he made the fishing rod with his bare hands, so. 

He tosses the still-struggling fish into the cooler, filling it mid-way with seawater, and opens the coconut in celebration. He should collect the kelp too, but he wants to show it to Changmin now. Maybe Changmin can grill it on the salt table tonight, and do the thing he did a few days ago, with the wild nuts. 

He looks up at the sky, and the sun’s directly overhead. Changmin should be done by now and back at camp. 

\--

Yunho hurries back, but he isn’t at camp. He puts everything but the cooler down and looks around, thinking.

Then he goes out through the tangle of trees, to stand at the tip of the slope. 

“Changmin?” He shouts, and there’s an answering call in the direction of the creek. 

He hurries over, bursting through the foliage, chattering excitedly, “Changdol, you won’t believe what just happened. I had a thought to try fly fishing on a whim, and I went north-east, and then I only just tried it so I was prepared to drop the fishing rod into the sea or whatever and I caught a fish, I was hoping so hard it wouldn’t be dead kelp, and it was a fish instead, it’s not very big, but it’s a-”

He breaks off and drops the cooler. Thankfully it lands upright. 

Changmin’s half-risen out of the creek, likely out of worry at the urgency and loudness of Yunho’s yell. He is very clearly in the middle of bathing. He freezes now, at Yunho’s abrupt entrance.

Yunho’s throat dries. 

Faintly, he thinks of a painting him and Changmin had seen together, years and years ago in a completely different part of the world. They were there for work, with people that Yunho spends time carefully not thinking about in the years after. The staff then had told them that apart from the cafés and the nightlife and the beautiful blonde girls, the Louvre was another place they shouldn’t miss. 

They’d found the painting tucked in a discreet wing on the second floor, away from the crowds thronging to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa or Nike of Samothrace. He’s no connoisseur of art, but it was pretty, and he remembers most clearly of all the concentrated look on Changmin’s face, how he had drifted as close as possible to gaze at it, and how his eyes had tracked over all the details and turns captured with delicate brushstrokes. 

Yunho thinks it was called _ Diana Leaving the Bath_. It was the work of a master but somehow it’s been supplanted by the sight before him now. 

Changmin’s body is an indulgence. It's a wet dream. It's Yunho's deepest, darkest, most private fantasy. 

He's been trying to not look at Changmin, to not think about impossible things, to not want _ more_. For the first time in a long time, Changmin's just there and Yunho's just… looking.

It’s been months and months, yet his torso is still as firmly defined as it had been when they had just been cast away. He’s positioned nearly just as _ Diana _ was, seated at the opposite edge of the creek, facing Yunho, body tilted, legs in the midst of uncrossing, to rise. 

He is, as _ Diana _ was, unapologetically and unabashedly naked. Yunho can see _ everything_.

He relaxes when he sees that Yunho isn’t hurt, sinking back down and crossing his legs again. 

Changmin's eyes flicker downwards and Yunho remembers with a start that he is only in his boxer briefs. It means the other’s probably caught an eyeful too. Yunho’s very aware of his own body’s betraying signs. 

He swallows and tries to laugh it off, as he’s always done, as they’ve always done. Rubbing at the back of his neck, he scruffs at the dirt with his trainers, awkward. He wills himself to calm. Think horrible things. Think about how they’re still lost and stranded and no one’s coming for them. It’s not working. “Ah. Sorry, I’ve interrupted you. You were, er. Found a lot of plants?”

The other merely raises an eyebrow. His hair is slicked back, and wet. A tendril dangles over his forehead. 

Yunho coughs and scratches at his stomach, then forces his hand back down by his side. “Too excited. Er. I just really want to you to know.”

Changmin uncrosses his legs. 

Yunho sucks in a breath, and thinks frantically about disgusting things like _ more tropical storms maggots floating out to sea Changmin in dead manager’s jeans forgetting how to dance the ravine. _ Nothing’s working but his mouth just goes on and on like a dysfunctional motor sputtering before it gives out. “I guess. I caught a fish? I’ll just. Er. Go back to camp? The fish is alive! Er. Thought you want to know. I can. Prep it later? Do you want salted snake for lunch? We can grill it. There’s still some left. You said it tastes like chicken. I. So what did you find?”

Changmin stands up. He’s… Oh. He’s. He is.

Yunho shuts his mouth so fast that his teeth knock together with a click. 

"You know,” Changmin says conversationally, remarkably relaxed despite the fact that he is facing Yunho in full frontal nudity. Only two burnishes of colour, very high on his cheekbones, and his body's visibly reciprocating interest betray the fact that he isn't feeling as calm as his cool expression suggested. "For the longest time, I thought you weren't interested. You never _looked_ at me." 

Yunho thinks his brain is leaking out from his ears. "What?" 

"Then after that," Changmin continues, taking a step, then another, so he's out of the creek and slowly but surely advancing towards Yunho. His legs are long long long miles long and perfect and beautiful. "All that shit went down, and it was just the two of us. Less distractions. Then I realised you _ looked_. Then I realised you were interested. You still are."

There's a definite swing to his hips. Yunho can't look away from all the golden brown skin. 

Changmin doesn't have a farmer's tan, not anymore. It’s all just… tanned. "But you never did anything. You just looked. And _ looked_."

He prowls closer. His nipples are tight and peaked. Yunho squeaks and shifts on his back foot. A low noise from Changmin makes him freeze. He feels like prey. "I…" 

Changmin comes nearer, closer, close enough to touch. Yunho's gaze is trapped by yet another errant water droplet, that meanders its way down defined abs, down the jut of his pelvis, and down, low, lower, lower.

Yunho tears his eyes away with extreme difficulty and back up Changmin's face, but what he sees there makes him emit another squeak.

There's a dip in the earth where Yunho is standing, and Changmin's on higher ground. It lets him tilt his head back, staring down his nose at Yunho. His eyes are half-lidded and direct and fierce and knowing and _ hungry_.

A whimper catches itself at the back of Yunho's throat. 

Changmin’s still talking low, soft, intimate. "You haven't stopped looking. You're still looking _ now_. But you won't touch. Why?"

Yunho can't speak. "Ch-Chang-"

"Look at you now," Changmin marvels. His hand comes up, and hovers near Yunho's cheek. They're not touching, but Yunho feels that contact like a burn upon his skin. "That famous ironclad Jung U-know Yunho control. Why are you making it so difficult for yourself?" 

He sidles even closer, until they’re almost sharing the same breath. 

Yunho can count Changmin’s eyelashes. They’re low swept, feathering crescents against his cheek. They tremble, lightened in the sunshine. 

Yunho can’t. He tries to form words, gives up. “I. I can’t.”

The lashes lift. “Why?” Changmin stares at him. This close, Yunho can see into his irises. They’re a deep brown-gold, instead of the more common Asiatic black. Yunho feels his own head jerk minutely to the side. “I can’t, I…”

“_Why_.” It’s more breath, more shape than sound. Changmin’s lips barely mouth the words, but Yunho hears him, loud and clear and like a spear through his head. “Give me a good reason. I’ll back off then. Just one good reason, Yun. You owe me that much.” 

“You… I.” Yunho forces his throat to work, forces his mouth to form the shape of consonants he’s forgotten. “You’re Changmin. You’re mine. You’re me. I can’t. You’re family. I… I_ can’t_.”

“Can’t what?” Changmin holds his chin aloft, higher. His mien is challenging. “Tell me why.” 

Yunho cracks, hurt and heart spilling open. “I can’t. I’ll hurt you. I can’t hurt you. Don’t want to hurt you. You’ll leave. You’ll leave me then.”

Changmin’s eyes are very, very wide and very, very round. He shakes his head, holding Yunho’s gaze.

It hurts, but this is Changmin. If there’s only one person in the whole wide world who deserves to see his soft underbelly, who deserves to see all the ugly, imperfect things he shoves away in the dark hidden from everyone else, it’s Changmin. 

Yunho brushes his fingers over the wing of Changmin’s cheekbone. His voice creaks. “I can’t. Because I’ll take. I take too much. I burn people out. And you’ll leave. They always leave. Everyone leaves. That’s fine. I can let them go. Everyone but you. Not you. I can’t walk alone anymore.” 

Changmin catches hold of his fingers. His eyes are still locked on Yunho’s. Twenty years gape wide between them and narrows, condenses in that one single look. “You have never been walking alone, and you never will be.”

The dam breaks. 

Throat squeezing around a sob, Yunho lurches forward. Changmin meets him halfway, as always.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #SMTown #AnalogTrip  
https://youtu. be/ioWAoEVYaP0  
Watch every week!
> 
> #GUILTY youtu. be/1XLxZ5rJzQs  
#toho15th #XV #東方神起
> 
> I have two words to say about Shim: Honey Ryder.
> 
> Final chapter will be up 10/16 in celebration of XV.


	5. v

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding recent events.  
Self-care is the most important thing in the world. If you hurt, no matter how hard it is, no matter how much you feel no one else will care. Please speak out and speak up. You are the best person equipped to save yourself. Things may surprise you. People may yet surprise you. Please take care of yourself. It's hard and it's an ongoing process, but keep it up. You are doing so well. 
> 
> Have an e-hug from me today; one stranger to another on the Internet. I love you. You love you. Be well.
> 
> As for the two lads, they have been in this industry upwards and creeping towards two decades. They have seen time and time again firsthand the beauty and the ugliness fans and people outside looking in are capable of. If you want to help them, please do so by only spreading respect and positivity. Do your part today in halting the hate. Don't react. Every time one declines to respond to negativity, you are helping to contain it.

Even though it’s been a very long time coming, they don’t do more. Well. More than.

There’s snot and tears and ugly crying and kissing and Changmin slugging him a good one in the gut, and more crying. More snot. More kisses. And also Changmin kicking him very hard in the shin and wresting his jeans on, in lieu of all the merciless jungle insects, who clearly are extremely unimpressed by their idea of romance. 

“Ah, God,” Yunho weeps, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyelids. Changmin has a hand clasped tight onto the crook of his neck, stroking, reassuring. The weight of that palm belies the fact that he's just socked Yunho a good one against his thigh. “Sorry-” 

“You’re a fucking dickhead, Jung Yunho,” Changmin chokes, mucus-clogged, “I hate you I hate you I hate you you’re stupid you’re so stupid when have I ever left you alone when have I ever even left you I’m not fucking crying like some wuss-”

“I know,” Yunho rubs hard at his eyes, “I’m stupid and I’m so sorry and I’ll never leave you alone ever again either I’ll never leave-”

Changmin clutches at him, fingers too tight and greedy and bruising and perfect. “You're stupid and I love you I love you I love you.” 

\--

They clean up again in the creek, taking longer than usual, because they keep stopping, and kissing, which defeats the purpose of getting clean, and they have to repeat the process again. 

Changmin finally puts a stop to it, tearing himself away and imposing a fallback to the standard two-minute military shower rule. Yunho’s done in a minute and a half, boxer briefs back on. 

Irked, Changmin glares at him, “put some goddamned clothes on, man, you’ll put someone’s eye out.” 

“No one’s eyes around but you,” Yunho parries back, but Changmin’s glare intensifies and it’s enough to make him shrink back, even with the last hour still replaying in a constant vivid loop across the back of his eyelids, whenever he closes his eyes to blink. 

Yunho knows he probably looks dumb, because there’s a huge grin on his face and he can feel his own mouth hurt slightly from smiling so much. But he can’t help it. 

Changmin takes one look at him, turns very red and mutters, “your face is fucking stupid, Jung Yunho,” and then turns around to splash water on his face and neck. His other clothes are folded neatly on the bank, layers because he went foraging. He pulls on a tee, and flings Yunho’s jumper at his head. “Put it on,” he barks. 

“You wore my jumper to hunt for plants, Min?” Yunho pulls it over his head, but it’s ridiculous because he doesn’t have his jeans on, and the jumper falls below the length of his underwear. It’s protection against some of the flies and mosquitoes, at least. “I’m not sure how this helps.” 

Changmin turns around, gets an eyeful and makes an odd sound that is part-scream, part-groan. His ears and face are still very red and he stalks past Yunho to jam his feet into his trainers. He snatches up his balled socks and hefts the pack, striding away very fast towards camp. 

Yunho follows, at a more leisurely pace. He picks up the cooler and peeks inside. The fish he had caught is still swimming around, disconsolate.

He whistles In A Different Life all the way back to camp. 

\-- 

Yunho steals one of Changmin’s red eyeliners to change the two stick figures into holding hands. 

He draws wider, redder, larger smiley faces on them. 

He writes "Yunho and Changmin" and then changes it to "Changmin and Yunho" and finally settles on

"YUNHO

<3

CHANGMIN"

"Are you done vandalising the wall? Can you come here now because I think the fire hole tunnel collapsed a little."

“Why do you even have a red eyeliner pencil? Doesn’t it make you look like you’re bleeding from your eyeballs?” 

“Yun, you do realise that half the time the makeup artists just chucked things into my bag because it’s big and they know I’ll have it with me, right?”

\--

Things are different now, even as they are the same. They still fight and play and squabble and laugh, push and pull, and Yunho comes to a belated realisation. 

Over grilled stingray doctored by wild ginger (Changmin had whooped when one of the tubers he had dug up turned out to not be a tuber after all, and is instead ginger), Yunho stares at Changmin accusingly, and points his chopsticks at their surroundings. They’ve lugged a large boulder into camp, and it serves as a low slung table of sorts, since its surface is flat enough. “Why does this feel the same?” 

Changmin merely raises an eyebrow. He eats a spoonful of leaves, blanched and seasoned with salt. “What are you on about now?” 

“This!” Yunho stabs his chopsticks in Changmin’s direction, then pulls it back to himself. “Us! Have we been dating all this while and no one told me?” 

Clearly that’s the wrong thing to say, because it makes Changmin choke mid-sip on his coconut water. “Do you think before you open your mouth to speak?”

“Hey,” Yunho begins, slightly offended, but Changmin leans over to brush a soft kiss over his mouth, at odds with his sharp words. Yunho subsides with a pleased hum, like a toddler who’s being offered a handful of sticky sweets. 

Changmin clears his throat. He picks up his chopsticks and lays them neatly parallel to each other next to the mess tin. He tilts the coconut husk - he’s drunk it dry. “Yun, every single concert we had, someone brings a ‘Marriedshinki’ banner. They’re huge. The fans write it on the flower stands they buy when we had events. They plaster it on the side of the coffee trucks they send to our shooting locations.”

“But that was because fan service,” Yunho says feebly. “You said it yourself! We were bowing to capitalism!” 

Changmin takes a spoon and starts scraping at the coconut flesh, movements smooth and practiced. “We’ve spent more than a decade in variety shows where people make the same joke about us being married over and over again. It’s a dead horse that’s been flogged into a zombie, that’s how stale it is.” 

“But- that was because-” Yunho grasps for reasons, floundering. Changmin takes pity on him and feeds him a white strip of coconut. Yunho chews, continuing, voice garbled, “people felt sorry for us! They pitied us, because suddenly it was just us two! So they had to find a concept to frame us in, to make us interesting!” 

Changmin just levels him with another pitying look. His fingers are nimble and steady. “‘Wae’ was written to be the perfect symbolic piece to represent our professional rebirth as a duo, yet up till our China concerts people still call it that ‘Happy Birthday Changmin’ song U-know Yunho performs every morning as dance practice.”

Nothing he can say to that. Yunho steals another piece of coconut from him and leans his head against Changmin’s shoulder. “....Really?” He asks after thinking too long about it, voice small. He feels foolish. Like a blind man suddenly with his vision restored.

Changmin ruffles his too-long hair. His hand is gentle, and curves around the shape of Yunho’s skull. They should probably try and cut each other’s hair soon. “Don’t worry about it, Yunho. At least now you know.” 

After a long while, Yunho sighs. “I am very lucky you are a patient man, Shim Changmin.” 

He pauses for a beat, and decides to try his luck. “So you think we’re married?”

\--

Yunho tries and fails to kill a bird with his bare hands. 

It shits on him instead, possibly in outraged affront. The sensation is warm and wet and utterly disgusting as it drips down his arm. Yunho maybe stares at his arm for a minute before his brain accepts that what just happened is reality. 

Changmin’s no help at all. For someone who promises to love Yunho forever and ever (and “cast away together on a deserted island” can probably make it in there as a dramatic qualifier), he’s enjoying this a little bit too much. He’s now crouched by the shrubs, eyes squinched shut and absolutely howling with laughter. 

Yunho stares for a moment, lost in how happy Changmin is, so in love, until he remembers that Changmin is laughing _ at _ him. Then he’s annoyed. 

“Yeah, laugh harder, sure. If you’re not careful, a bird is going to shit inside your mouth,” Yunho mutters viciously, and Changmin just cackles even harder. He's going so hard at it that Yunho tells him sourly he hopes Changmin remembers to breathe, and not to choke on his spit. 

After Yunho’s scrubbed his arm clean with a handful of dry leaves and cool, clear water from the creek, Changmin comes over. He’s still quivering with suppressed laughter, but he jostles a consoling shoulder into Yunho’s, and shows him the three eggs he's got in his hands. 

“I checked against the light,” he grins. “Omelettes for dinner?”

“You heartless bastard,” Yunho says approvingly, and kisses him hard.

\--

Changmin asks him seriously if he wants to try and build a raft. 

“We can try, if you want,” he says, hushed. 

It’s a rainy day and they’re huddled beneath their rocky outcrop at camp, warm and sheltered and safe. Yunho had rigged up an extending canopy of sorts, with the oilskin tarp and rope they got from the ravine, to prevent rainwater runoff from trickling into the sheltered area. Now their overhang is almost like a little bedroom cave, with their parachute-and-moss pallet, clothing pillows and scarves as blankets. 

Through the half-open slits in the tarp, steam rises slowly from the fire-pit, which has been safely covered by rocks and is under its own chute canopy. The rain patters down, a soothing _ ssh-ssh-ssh_. They’re the only two people on this island, but the sense of intimate shelter has them murmuring in whispers to each other. “We have enough supplies to build one, and there’s so much wood around.”

Yunho is in the midst of sorting out coconut fibres, to finally continue what he had embarked on in Saipan so many years ago. He has all the time in the world now to perfect the dubiously ancient art of coconut fibre rope-making. Changmin’s saved enough husks for him, preferring to remove the fibrous outer layer and turn his ever-growing collection of coconut bowls into smooth-edged pieces.

He pauses in his movements, picking sightlessly at tangled knots in the husks. Changmin’s a lovely warm weight half-on him, half sprawled on the moss.

Yunho strokes a hand through Changmin’s hair, newly shorn. He misses tugging on it, but visually, Changmin with short hair is like a gut-punch to the senses. Yunho’s left it longer on top, because Changmin with short hair and hair in his eyes is like a gut-punch followed by a head kick. 

His own hair has been clipped shorter too. The island’s tropical climate is not friendly to anything longer than ear-length styles, at a very loose definition of the word. 

He’s been silent too long. He sighs. He knows Changmin can feel the movement, because the other has his head in Yunho’s lap, and now he’s tensed up, long limbs rigid. 

Yunho sets the coconut fibres aside. He pats his hands clean. “What about you? Do you think we should build a raft?”

“I asked first,” Changmin grouses, but he heaves himself upright, and folds himself cross-legged facing Yunho. Yunho’s almost sorry he said anything, because now Changmin’s seated entirely too far away. 

He stretches out a hand and traces a finger over Changmin’s bare knee. The rain has made them lazy today, so they’re both in their boxer briefs since they went from their morning low-tide forage to back in bed. “I don’t know,” Yunho admits.

Raking a hand through his cropped hair, Changmin looks bewildered. “I would have thought you’d say yes,” he says. 

“There is a large part of me that wants to say yes,” Yunho agrees. “There is a large part of me that wants to ask you how many things can we bring and how much wood do we need and how big we should build the raft.” 

Changmin knows him too well. He looks away, towards where a tropical drizzle is falling in slow vertical lines outside of their little bubble. “But?”

“But there’s an even larger part of me that says no,” Yunho takes Changmin’s hands in his. They’re beautiful hands, large, with long and bony fingers. Elegant artist hands. They used to be buffed and polished and manicured, usually found grasping mics or plucking at guitar strings. 

They’re calloused now, because of the life they’re living, and covered with battle scars. White thin marks, where he cut himself in the initial days, gutting fish. Rope burn, from tying and retying knots at camp. A thin ragged line, where he accidentally came up against a sharp rock whilst digging for tubers. A splotch of an old burn, when he had scalded himself on one of the wet rocks in the fire pit while cooking. 

Yunho lifts them up in his hands, and presses his lips against them, one at a time. He can feel them trembling, ever so slightly. “Hyung’s not good with words, Min. But I’ll try to explain. That day by the creek, I made a promise to these hands. We don’t leave each other alone. If we go back, that’s what’s going to happen to us. We won’t fully belong to ourselves, like we do here. There will always be people telling us what to do, no matter how well-meaning their intentions. I don’t think I’ll be allowed to do this,” he leans forward, and pecks an open-mouthed kiss against Changmin’s lips, “whenever I want. And _ that _ is not something I want. You are the only person that should be able to tell me what to do with us.” 

“Another thing I’m worried about,” he continues, “is our chances out there. I’m guessing we’ve been here for maybe a year, two years- no, don’t tell me, I still don’t want to know the exact number. I’ve been listening everyday. So have you, I know. There are still no ships. We don’t know what is the situation outside our island. Is there other land? Can we dock somewhere? What if the current carries us off, further into the Pacific Ocean, or wherever here is, and our supplies dwindle? What if there’s a storm, and our raft capsizes? There are a lot of questions I have no answer to. I’m not risking you to that.”

He ends his impromptu speech feeling clumsy and tongue-tied. 

Silence curls about them, a fat and content little cat that wends. Her purr is the faint shushing of rain. The scent of petrichor sits warmly heavy in their nostrils. 

“Sappy, Jung,” Changmin comments, voice very soft. 

He’s still carefully not looking at Yunho, and his lashes are wet. His hands lay curled, relaxed, in Yunho’s. “What happened to Passion Man? He used to want to devour the world.” 

“Passion Man is not stupid,” Yunho emphasises. “Passion Man still wants to devour the world. Passion Man just wants to be alive doing it. Passion Man is very certain he will make the best and longest and strongest coconut ropes ever. Passion Man has a refined plan for making bigger salt pans in the shallows. Passion Man also has a new idea about making soap because he was cleaning grease and ash from the fire-pit the other day and there were bubbles.”

“It’s always creepy whenever you talk about yourself in the third person,” Changmin closes his hands tight about Yunho’s knuckles. He rubs his own over Yunho’s latest battle scar. Yunho had tried to make Changmin knives using shells for the first time the other day and the cut across his palm was the result. It didn’t hurt, at least not as much as Changmin’s fussing had warranted. The cut was straight and there was minimal bleeding and a little iodine and alcohol fixed it up. 

Changmin turns his palms, and laces their fingers together. “You are sure.” 

Yunho knocks his forehead gently against Changmin’s. “It’s not like we are deliberately sabotaging ourselves. We have five giant SOS signs around the island. If a plane comes for us, I think we’ll go back then. But I’m not risking what I have at hand for something that isn’t even definite.” 

“There’s a high chance we’ll never be able to see our parents again. Our sisters. Our friends,” Changmin murmurs, eyes downcast. He looks up at Yunho. 

“Yes,” Yunho gazes back, his heart aching and infinitely full. “But I have you.”

\--

“Wait. _Five_ SOS signs?” 

“Oh. You caught that.”

“I thought we have four!”

“I may have. Made another? Down south?”

“For fuck’s sake, Jung Yunho! Have you been stealing my cooking rocks?”

“No!” 

“You _ liar_.”

“There are rocks in the creek! I took those!”

\--

The two of them nestle close that night, entwined in each other. Changmin’s been coy about sex, the oversized elephant in their not-room, for all that he was the one practically seducing Yunho by prancing around buck naked in the wilderness. 

“I wasn’t the one taking my shirt off any chance I have,” Changmin protests, jabbing him in the chest, when Yunho points this out.

Yunho rolls his eyes. “I didn’t do that to s- I was hot!”

“Yes you are,” Changmin leers exaggeratedly, and the tension dissolves, slow and sweet like sugar, the two of them laughing and falling into each other. Yunho presses sucking kisses along any inch of Changmin’s skin that he can reach. 

It tickles, and Changmin laughs again. He pushes against Yunho now too, eager yet somehow still tentative.

“Talk to me, Min,” Yunho nuzzles against him, nose to nose and skin to skin and heart to heart. “Tell me what you are fearful of. Have you done this before? With another man?” 

“Nothing, I-” Changmin shakes his head, and holds Yunho close. He snorts, self-deprecating. “Yes. But it was a very long time ago. Not like this. Nothing’s ever like this. There’s no one like you.” 

Yunho laughs, rutting up at him. “There’s no one else like you, too.”

He flips them over, and bends down, rubbing his nose against Changmin’s. “We’ll go slow. Hyung will take care of you.”

“Fuck, talking about yourself in third person is really not sexy, Yun,” Changmin mock-complains, but he’s flushed and willing and sweet and gorgeous and his arms are very tight around Yunho.

“Because you take care of me,” Yunho murmurs, voice thick. “You take such good care of me. Now let me take care of you.” 

Changmin’s trembling, laughter forgotten. Yunho leans in, brushes his mouth once, twice, thrice against the other’s parted lips. “Let me love you, Min.” 

\--

“Do we still have that Innisfree hand cream?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s in the cooler, why?” 

\--

They exhale in twin gasps as Changmin finally pushes through. He’s used the hand cream liberally and thoughtlessly, until Yunho tells him that’s practically half the tube gone and they have to ration it because these things don’t grow on trees anymore.

“There’s another- I’ve another- Never mind,” Changmin’s trying to keep himself from moving, biting hard at his lip, while Yunho smiles up at him, full everywhere in heart and mind and body and soul. 

“I love you,” he says.

“Yeah, I know,” Changmin babbles, wet messy fringe in his eyes. He’s already sweating. “Fuck. Tight. We’re only doing this on special occasions-”

“What?” Yunho jolts and squirms, infuriated, earlier contentment gone. It pulls a gasping moan from Changmin, and Yunho feels proud, but only momentarily. He throws a fist against Changmin’s chest. “Shouldn’t I make the decision on this?” 

Changmin makes an involuntary thrust forward and they both sigh. Then he visibly gathers his wits and glares down at Yunho. The sight shouldn’t be arousing, but it is. Yunho’s heartbeat quickens, blood rushing in his ears, and he nearly misses it when Changmin grits out, “because- I’m not nursing you through. An infection or- a perforated! Asshole. Maybe. Once a. Year?”

Yunho stills. “Wow,” he decides after Changmin makes another tortured half-moan, half scream and lunges forward, “_right there! _You bastard, your dick’s not that awesome that it’s gonna spear me open or something.” 

“Doesn’t feel like it,” Changmin gasps, and does something that makes Yunho grunt and roll them over, and there’s no more room for conversation.

\-- 

They’re both strangely shy afterwards. Changmin’s feeding Yunho little bites of coconut, Yunho leaning against his thigh, until he sets the husk down with an audible thud and declares, “I meant it, you know.”

“What?” Yunho’s too preoccupied with licking stray bits of coconut off of Changmin’s fingers to actually listen to whatever nonsense he’s blabbering on about now. He runs the flat of his tongue over Changmin’s really clean fingers and pauses. Oh. He should do that again because he might have missed a spot. 

He does it once more, and Changmin brushes a thumb against the divot in Yunho’s lower lip. He clears his throat and try again, “The…. that. You. Yeah. What we just did.” 

Yunho floors him with a droll look. “Min, use your big boy words. Hyung says you can do it.”

Changmin blushes. Then he glares at Yunho. “The, um. Penetrative intercourse.”

A pause, then he kicks at Yunho when the latter sprawls over, sniggering so hard that he ends up snorting into the moss. Yunho chortles, patting at it. Probably they’ll have to swap out the entire pallet in the morning. It’s sticky from the unspeakable things they just did to each other. At least they weren’t so addled that they did it on the ’chute, instead. That would have been challenging to wash in the creek. 

“Stop laughing,” Changmin threatens, but he’s grinning himself, clearly tickled against his own will by Yunho’s mirth, face open and gorgeous and eyes crinkling so hard that they’re nearly disappearing. “Stop laughing! I’m being serious! We can do other things but not that!” 

Yunho’s snickering so hard that his vision is blurry from tears, but he forces himself to sober when he hears the tail end of Changmin’s sentence. “What? Why?”

Changmin rolls his eyes. “Weren’t you listening?”

“But,” Yunho splutters, “we’re not sure that’ll really happen!” 

“There’s probably a high risk! There’s definitely a high risk!” Changmin volleys back. His mouth is still soft-looking although he’s not laughing anymore, and he’s got one arm on Yunho’s thigh and the other around Yunho’s waist and he’s clinging like a koala. “We can do everything else. But the strongest medication in our first aid kit is antibiotics and anti-inflammatory painkillers, so forgive me, but I’ll rather not risk it. Just special occasions. We can do everything else. Like-” his gaze slides away, bashful again. 

“Special occasions? Like what? Christmas? Chuseok? The New Year?” Yunho smacks him gently on the cheek for being ridiculous. Then he brightens. “How about Sundays? God says they’re special. Day of rest. Wednesday is special too. Hump day. Mm.” 

Changmin rolls his eyes so hard that for a second, Yunho only sees the whites of his eyes. “Jung Yunho!”

“What about days when I top?” Yunho tries to negotiate. He hauls Changmin into his lap, oversized though he is. 

“Fuck me, I’ve created a monster.” Changmin’s turned his face away, but his struggles are playful. He’s not trying to get away, instead sinking so he leans on his side, against Yunho’s shoulder. He’s too warm and too heavy, and Yunho won’t change him for anything in the world. 

“Sure, hyung will do it as long as you ask hyung nicely. Maybe rainy days too? How’s that for special? We always celebrate it by staying in camp for the whole day, anyway.” Yunho nudges at Changmin’s cheek, mouthing up to a reddened ear. 

He gets a vicious pinch to his side for his troubles. “Oh fuck you, _ go away_!”

“Well, I’d love to, you’re the one who’s being all missish.” Yunho points out, tightening his arms when Changmin makes to get up, groaning that Yunho actually went _ that far _ in bad joke territory.

“Ugh, why do I even.” Changmin’s trying to throw his arm off, and he’s putting in actual strength and succeeding. So Yunho wrestles him back down instead, pins him by lying on top of him and frames his handsome, dear face between hands, kisses and kisses him until he acquiesces, until he’s pliant and malleable and putty in Yunho’s hands. 

Yunho suggests brightly, “maybe I can top this time. Share the love and the risk for asshole infection and whatnot.”

“You!”

—

_ end. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your support of "i can't walk alone anymore". 
> 
> Somehow you all got it to 100 kudos even before the end. This little thing is very special to me, it has been the fastest >10k wordcount fic I've done in 15 years of writing and across fandoms. Part of that is due to of course personal circumstances. But it can also be attributed to my continuing fascination for more than a decade about their evolving relationship and the many and complex ways these two men relate to each other. 
> 
> I only realised belatedly that this fits well to one of my favourite S.H.E. songs, so here you go: https://youtu. be/ZcGrAdXGlks  
If you have time and are interested, do look up the English translation to the lyrics if you don't understand Mandarin. 
> 
> Comments are love, and I'll be absolutely delighted to hear your feedback on this little fic now that it is up in its entirety. 
> 
> This final 4000 words is for Mouldsee.  
I had some pithy little jokes lined up; but reality hasn't been kind to all of us this week. So I leave you with only the ending lines of one of her favourite 東方 songs, which she has dedicated to me with a beautiful first-parter of a birthday gift last week: 君に届け, It’s my love song.
> 
> See you on #officeantics and Sing! Idol after this.


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